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Ellen Ann Willmott, described by her contemporary Gertrude Jekyll as being ‘the greatest of living women-gardeners’, is today known mostly for her Genus Rosa as well as for the clandestine efforts she undertook in introducing the sea holly, ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ into the gardens she visited. Dr Susan Gordon investigates the remarkable life of this Victorian genius of the place.

Early life

Miss Willmott's memorial plaqueEllen Ann Willmott, accomplished botanist, gardener, horticulturalist, musician and photographer, was active in England, France and Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many years she held a leading place among women in horticulture. From her earliest days, she was closely associated with gardens.

Miss Willmott was born on 19 August 1858 in Spring Grove, Heston, Middlesex, England, at one time the home of Sir Joseph Banks. Her father, Frederick Willmott (1825-1892) was a solicitor and financier of Southwark, London. Her mother, Ellen (1826-1898) was a third-generation gardener and the only child of Mr James Fell, a wealthy Catholic merchant, of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. [1]

Ellen Ann was the eldest of three daughters and spent the early years of her childhood living with her younger sister Rose (later Berkeley) (1861-1922) and her youngest sister Ada Mary (1864-1872) at her parents’ home. [2]

The Willmott family's first home, Vernon House, at 52 Spring Grove in Heston, Middlesex was a three-storey double-fronted suburban villa with its own built-in coach house and private three-quarter acre formal garden, set within a 300-acre landscaped estate. It had been designed and laid out by Mr Henry Daniel Davies in 1852 as part of a speculative housing development for middle class residents. [3]

Willmott was educated, along with her sisters, at Gumley House Convent School in nearby Isleworth. The school (which opened in 1841) aimed to give girls in England the type of Roman Catholic education which, up until then, had generally only been obtainable abroad. [4] All three Willmott girls were enrolled as day students.

From around the age of 7, Ellen began receiving a £1,000 cheque for her birthday from her godmother, Helen Ann (later Countess) Tasker (died 1888), of Middleton Hall, Brentwood, Essex.

Miss Tasker, the childless cousin of Ellen Ann's mother, was a painter and a wealthy philanthropist [5]. She had helped establish convents, hospitals, Catholic churches and schools in the UK and was in 1870 given the title ‘Countess in the Holy Roman or Pontifical States' by Pope Pius IX [6]. Tasker's yearly gift to Willmott equates to roughly £15,000 in today's terms [7].

In 1872, when Ellen was 13, tragedy struck. Her youngest sister, Ada Mary, then aged only 7, died having suffered from diphtheria.

In 1875, the Willmotts bought a new home, Warley Place, in Essex. It was here that Ellen Ann Willmott was able to practice fully her gardening and horticultural skills and develop the botanical knowledge for which she would later become 'world-renowned'.

Warley Place

Warley Place, Brentwood, EssexThe Willmotts' second family home, Warley Place, near Brentwood in Essex, was very unlike Vernon House. It was an 'old-fashioned' country house set on a private estate of over 30 acres. Red-brick, pedimented, and built on high ground, within 20 miles commuting distance from the City which it overlooked, it was ‘in every character suitable for the occupation of a family of the highest respectability'. [8]

It was here that Mr, Mrs, and the Misses Willmott - as they were known collectively - began to lay the ground work for what would later become referred to as ‘the gardens which Miss Willmott's devoted skill made famous throughout the world'. [9]

Warley Place was already famous before the arrival of the Willmotts. It had long been associated with the great English diarist and arborealist, Sir John Evelyn (1620-1706) who had bought the lease to the manor of Warley Magna on 12 May 1649 and had, it was believed, laid out and planted the grounds toward the end of the 17th century. [10]

The Spanish chestnuts, said to have been planted by John EvelynAt the time the Willmotts came to live at Warley in the summer of 1876, the grounds were said to have still been very much as ‘John Evelyn - who lived there for a time and wrote much of his Silva there - had left it'. It was richly furnished with ‘fine specimen trees', including a row of Spanish chestnuts, rumoured to have been planted by John Evelyn himself, as well as ‘meadows of Crocus vernus, which had been there since Evelyn's times'. [11]

Crocus vernus

Although unsubstantiated, these were connections Ellen Ann herself was all too happy to promote. Upon her arrival at Warley, she became especially interested in continuing the tradition of cultivating crocus for which the garden had been earlier famous and even referred to Evelyn in some of her later correspondences. [12]

To these earlier features, she would later add great quantities of daffodils and other bulbs to the fields, banks and sheltered spots at Warley. She also created a rock garden and, lastly, a water garden. The skill and care in gardening she showed in doing so, would earn the high praise of her male and female contemporaries. [13]

Naturalised bulbs at WarleyOver the course of the next 30 years, and at one point with the assistance of up to 104 gardeners, Ellen Ann Willmott, and the plant hunters she supported, would make Warley, in the eyes of many, ‘not only one of the most beautiful, but also one of the most interesting of English gardens'. [14]

A family of gardeners

Ellen Ann Willmott was the fourth generation of 'amateur gardeners of distinction' in her family [15]. Her uncle, Charles Willmott, is said by her to have been both ‘a fair botanist and very good horticulturalist and greatly interested in plants' and her mother to have been ‘growing several New Zealand plants and shrubs [raised from seed sent by him]... long before their general introduction' [16]. She is said herself to have had ‘an innate love of flowers' and by the age of 18 ‘a mind already attuned to the renaissance of hardy plant gardening then occurring' [17].

Willmott's work at Warley was highly influenced by her friend, the enthusiastic horticultural reformer William Robinson (1838-1935), a Quaker, who had himself only recently initiated a rebirth of hardy plant gardening and use of alpines in English gardens with the publication of his two books The Wild Garden and Alpine Flowers for Gardens in 1870. The latter had gone into its second edition (1875) by the time Ellen and her family had come to Warley.

Warley Place thus proved to be a great opportunity for the young Miss Willmott, offering her ‘an ideal foundation on which to build' [18]. She had plenty of time to devote to helping her family revive and replant Warley. By the time she was living there, with her parents and sister Rose, she had already left school [19].

Remains of a cold store at WarleyWhen not playing music, lawn tennis or badminton, visiting flower shows, other people's gardens or the theatre, attending garden parties, balls or cricket games, practising skating, painting or photography, or touring British and European health spas with her family, Ellen Ann would be found hard at work in the meadow, orchard, kitchen and formal gardens, vineries, greenhouses and cold pits at Warley.

Herbaceous border at Warley Place, 1909

Ellen Ann Willmott shared her ‘inherited' interests in gardening with her sister Rose, who, with her so-called ‘rare taste in grouping' seems to have first mostly limited her work at Warley to the herbaceous borders. Her mother, ‘a most energetic and enterprising gardener', whom modern writers often describe as having ‘held strongly contrary views on the Victorian practices of carpet bedding and ribbon borders', appears to have started a rose collection from seed there, and to have involved both girls in an early plant hunting exercise, looking around the county for plants, with an Essex origin, for use in the formal garden [20] .

The Alpine Garden

In 1879 at the age of 21, after assisting her mother with the development of the formal garden at Warley, Ellen Ann Willmott is said to have asked permission from her recently retired father to cash in some of the birthday money she had been accumulating from her godmother, over the past 15 years, and to put it towards the development of a new Alpine Garden at Warley [21].

Construction for the alpine garden began in the early 1880s and was carried out by the Quaker firm of landscape gardeners James Backhouse and Sons Ltd. of York, who were specialists in the Alpine and in the creation of exquisite rock gardens.

Alpine garden, Warley PlaceMiss Willmott's rock garden, built by the Backhouses, was one of the first in the country to be constructed on a grand scale. It was located just below the bowling green, to the south west of the main drive, still within sight of the house, and took the form of a mountainous gorge of rocky slopes and gullies.

It contained, amongst several other features, both shattered and half buried stones, huge boulders, curved steps, ponds, an alpine stream, stone bridge and a glassed roofed cave, called the Filmy Fern Grotto, which housed, along its walls and on its floor, groupings of filmy ferns from New Zealand and the British Isles.

Frontispiece from William Robinson's Alpine Flowers for GardensIt was a major undertaking, necessary in order to allow Willmott to grow alpine plants in an environment approaching their native habitat. The terrain excavated by the Backhouses was deep enough to protect the plants from the winds and harsh weather and there was enough soil, water, and variously sized and variously exposed Millstone grit stones supplied by them from Yorkshire to allow her to successfully cluster small as well as bushy plants on and around them, many of which were rare and reputedly difficult.

In February 1880, Ellen Ann's father notes in his diary: ‘Ellie began the erection of her Gypsy Hut near the Pond' and on 1 April 1882: 'Ellie began her new Alpine garden.' [22]

Ellen Ann Willmott's work at Warley was very bold and imaginative and carried out with zest at a time when Ellen Ann's mother was mostly confined to a Bath chair, so was doing very little active gardening herself.

For her work on making a sunken garden for Alpine plants at Warley, Miss Willmott was deemed a pioneer. Several contemporary authors, both in the UK and abroad, were full of enthusiastic admiration for her and for her new gardens which were seen as a much welcomed break from the ‘dreadful "rockwork" of mid-Victorian times' as well as ‘a source of pleasure and inspiration to many who have seen it.' [23]

The Alpine garden, 1909Illustrations of Warley Place, as well as photographs Miss Willmott had herself sent in of various Alpine flowers, later appeared in parts one and two of Robinson's The English Flower Garden, first published in 1883. Miss Willmott presented a copy of this in 1884 to what must have been her - by then - very proud mother on her birthday. [24]

Gardening in France

By the time Ellen Ann Willmott was 30, the accumulated birthday money she had spent on creating the new Alpine Garden at Warley, was recouped with the passing of the Countess Tasker, her benevolent godmother. Tasker died on 3 January 1888 leaving Willmott approximately £140,000 - the equivalent of roughly £5 million in today's terms [25].

Thereafter followed years of extravagant spending by Willmott, including the purchase of a chateau at Tresserve, near Aix-les-Bains, in France in 1890, and the establishment there of a second garden in which to further indulge her love of flowers and exotic Alpines.

Ellen Ann bought the chateau for 50,000 francs (£2,000) after embarking upon a year-long grand tour of Europe with her family from the summer of 1888 to summer 1889 [26]. She also bought further pieces of land to increase its size. Her gardener at Tresserve was Claude Meunier.

Enormous quantities of plants were purchased from Henri Correvon's Jardin Alpin d'Acclimatation at Geneva in the early years of the 1890s. Correvon (1854-1939) a renowned Alpine specialist, who founded the Jardin in 1884, was also director of La Linnea Gardens at Bourg St. Pierre (founded in 1889), and a frequent visitor to Warley.

The chateau itself was stocked with Louis XVth and XVIth furniture and rare books [27]. Ellen Ann also used her money to engage in her other passions: music and craft. She amassed a fine collection of musical and mechanical instruments, including a rather expensive - even though second-hand - Holtzapffel lathe (No. 2287) for turning wood and ivory, on which she used to make rings and ivory boxes in her own private workroom at Warley; four Amati instruments, including two violins, a viola and a cello, purchased from W.E. Hill and Sons; a Crossley Brothers (No. 36857) ‘Otto' silent gas engine-powered organ; a Cowper's parlour printing press, and a Holtzapffel's monotype printing press on which, it is said, she used to enjoy setting up the type for some of the first seed lists produced at Warley [28].

Numerous plants from Correvon were also purchased for Warley at this time and the house and gardens there were prepared for her sister's wedding to Robert Berkeley of Spetchley Park, which took place in the summer of 1891 [29]. During the years 1890 to 1900, Ellen's yearly bill with Russell Nursery was quite often in the region of £21,500 [30].

Ellen Ann Willmott's father passed away in 1892 leaving her with a further inheritance [31]. In 1894, she joined the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and was appointed a life fellow.

That same year, she acquired the services of 19-year-old Jacob Maurer, one of Correvon's Swiss gardeners, whom she persuaded to move to Warley to oversee and make improvements to the Alpine Garden, promising him a house and £1-a-week pension. Maurer moved into South Lodge with his wife in 1905. A circular Alpine propagating house was installed behind the lodge to supply the garden.

Daffodils at Warley PlaceWith Maurer now entrenched in the Alpine garden, Willmott's attention turned towards the cultivation and hybridisation of daffodils. She bought the stock of daffodil breeder the Reverend George Herbert Engleheart of Appleshaw, Andover and began hybridising at Warley from the mid-1890s.

In 1895 Correvon offered the Alpine Garden at Warley high praise in his book, Les Plantes Alpines et de Rocailles [32]. Two years later, when the Victoria Medal of Honour was first instituted by the RHS in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year, Miss Willmott was one of only two women among the first 60 recipients of the award. The other was Gertrude Jekyll, who accepted Willmott's award on her behalf.

That same year, Willmott was elected to the RHS Narcissus Committee, her sister Rose moved with her husband and daughter to Spetchley Park after the death of her father in law, and Ellen Ann purchased the Jordan collection of sempervivum from the French botanist Claude Thomas Alexis Jordan (1814-1897) of Lyon.

In March 1897, Narcissus ‘Ellen Willmott', raised and shown by the Reverend Engleheart, won an RHS first class certificate. In July, Miss Willmott exhibited a group of verbena, for which she was accorded a silver Banksian medal. Verbena ‘Tresserve', shown by J.T. Bennett-Pope, received a RHS Award of Merit later in August.

Also in 1897, with her independent income still sufficient enough to enable it, Ellen Ann Willmott began to subsidise the plant hunting expeditions, in Persia, Armenia and Turkestan, of two collectors for Mr John Hoog of van Tubergens Zwanenburg nurseries in Haarlem, Kronenburg and Sintenis. [33] She became especially interested in the iris and tulip bulbs they were discovering.

In 1898, Lilium x marhan ‘Ellen Willmott', was shown by van Tubergen, and awarded a first class certificate.

The same year her mother died, leaving Miss Willmott the enterprise at Warley and a further £70,000 inheritance. By the time she was 40, Ellen Ann Willmott was in charge of the gardens at Warley Place.

Miss Willmott worked among her gardeners [35]. Surviving contemporary accounts describe her as being always dressed in black, ‘slim, rather beady-eyed, with gingerish tendrils of hair escaping from under her hat, always in a hurry' [36].

She had a reputation for knowing the location of every bulb in her garden and for being a hard taskmaster who would not allow a weed or plant to be out of place without someone losing their job .‘No one ever quite knew where she was going to appear next. So the safest thing, if you wanted to keep your job, was to put in a good day's work and mostly they did.' [37]

In 1899, Tulipa willmottiae was collected in the eastern mountains by van Tubergen's collector Kronenburg. Iris willmottiana was also collected from east Turkestan for van Tubergen.

That same year, Willmott began experimenting with Primula viscosa hybrids at Warley [38]. In July, Campanula ‘Warley' won a RHS Award of Merit. In November, Nerine ‘Miss Willmott', shown by Mr H.J. Elwes of Colesbourne, Gloucestershire, and Nerine ‘Miss Berkeley', were both accorded RHS Awards of Merit.

Bulb breeding

Naturalised daffodils, Warley PlaceAt the beginning of the 20th century, Miss Willmott's success in breeding and cultivating daffodils earned her several prizes and Awards of Merit from the RHS for the new varieties and hybrids she had introduced, many of which she named after her friends and relatives: for example, ‘Mrs. Berkeley' and ‘Little Lost Ada' [39].

She had a collection of more than 600 different species and hybrid daffodils in her walled gardens at Warley and, as far back as the turn of the century, is reputed to have made the head of the gardens fix trip wires around the daffodils in the fields, which would set off air guns to frighten anyone hoping secretly to pick some [40].

Miss Willmot also had collections of tulips and irises from all over the world and had worked on irises with the botanist Sir Michael Foster (1836-1907), Professor of Physiology at Cambridge [41].

In 1901, Iris warleyensis was collected in Bokhara by van Tubergen's collector, Kronenburg. Willmott was the first cultivator to bring it into flower in England. Iris willmottiana won a RHS Award of Merit in April that year.

In 1902, in her book Roses for English Gardens, Gertrude Jekyll gratefully acknowledged Willmott's valuable help in compiling the list of rose species as garden plants and for providing the text with a considerable number of her own photographs.

In March 1902, Iris warleyensis received a RHS first class certificate. While Narcissus ‘Warley Magna', an Engleheart seedling shown by Willmott, won a RHS Award of Merit a month later.

The following year, Willmott became one of the first three trustees of the RHS garden at Wisley in Surrey. Her friend Sir Thomas Hanbury had given over the 60-acre site to the RHS and the Society moved its garden there from Chiswick. Willmott appears to have been instrumental in both persuading the RHS to buy the site and Hanbury to present it [42].

Also in 1903, Miss Willmott received an RHS first class certificate for Tulipa praestans, one of the Reverend Engleheart's seedlings, and her wild and Alpine gardens were endorsed by William Robinson.

In the third edition of Alpine Flowers for Gardens, Robinson included several illustrations of the gardens at Warley (based on Miss Willmott's own photographs) and a dedication to the memory of the late James Backhouse of York (1825-1890) ‘mountain-lover, naturalist, and rock gardener'. In his 1903 foreword, Robinson wrote:

‘Much improvement, both in design and cultivation of rock-gardens and rock plants, has taken place within the past twenty years, or so, and some effects on these rock gardens are now seen that were impossible on the old form of "rock-work", with its dust-dry pockets and hopeless ugliness. At Friar Park, Henley-on-Thames, South Lodge, Leonardslee, Warley Place, Batsford, and many other places we may see not only the rarest Alpine plants admirably grown, but effects and colour not unworthy of the Alpine fields.' [43]

Warley may not have had its own Matterhorn, but it did have. to the north west of the Alpine garden, the hut - complete with mountain furniture and herdsman's gear - in which Napoleon is said to have spent the night while crossing the Alps into Italy in May 1800 [44].

‘I have never seen anything more beautiful in nature or in gardens than grassy banks planted with the smaller and rarer Narcissi in the gardens at Warley Place,' Robinson continues in his main text. [45]

A year later, in 1904, Miss Willmott was accorded the honour of becoming one of the very first women to be elected a fellow of the Linnean Society [46]. She was also, that year, reputedly approached by Sir William Turner Thiselton-Dyer(1843-1928),then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to help with printing a supplement to Georg August Pritzel's Iconum Botanicum [47].

Between 1904 and 1907, Miss Willmott won the RHS gold medal for various groups of rare daffodils and was supplying the trade with bulbs. Narcissus ‘Great Warley', an Engleheart seedling that she showed, won an RHS first class certificate in April 1904.

Ellen Ann Willmott was formally admitted as a life fellow of the Linnean Society on 19 January 1905. In February that year, Crocus chrysanthus ‘Warley' received a RHS Award of Merit as did Dianthus ‘Miss Wilmott', shown by nurseryman Mr J. Douglas later in July and Tulipa fosteriana.

An Italian garden

The terrace at Warley under restorationIn 1905, with her independent income still intact, and further replenished with inheritances from both her parents, Ellen Ann Willmott purchased a third garden, La Boccanegra, near Ventimiglia on the Ligurian coast of the Italian Riviera, near her friend Thomas Hanbury's La Mortola, which she often visited. Soon afterwards, she began laying out the gardens there and ordering plants on a large scale [48].

Visiting both her French Alpine and Italian Mediterranean gardens for no more than a month at a time, twice a year, Miss Willmott kept in constant contact with the head gardeners at all three gardens through the clever use of a series of pre-printed addressed postcards which were left with the gardeners so that ‘they may instantly communicate' with her when needed [49].

In addition to plants, Willmott also spent a lot of her money on antiques, chain-driven cars, clothes, food, jewellery, rare botanical and madrigal books, silverware and subscriptions and donations to various national, regional and local societies [50]. In the spring of 1906, she spent over £1,100 on a redecoration of the interiors of Warley house [51].

But it was gardening that was still her main and most passionate love interest. That same year, Willmott wrote to Professor Charles Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, MA, USA:

...as you know, my plants and my gardens come before anything in life for me, and all my time is given up to working in one garden or another, and when it is too dark to see the plants themselves I read or write about them. [52]

This was to be the start of a six year correspondence between the two.

Narcissus ‘Warleyensis', raised and shown by Miss Willmott, won a RHS Award of Merit in April 1906.

To augment and keep up to date her near-comprehensive collection of hardy trees and shrubs at all three of her gardens, Willmott helped finance Ernest Henry Wilson's third plant hunting trip to China.

Ernest Henry Wilson (1896-1930) first went to China in 1899. This was followed by a second trip in 1903. Both trips were on behalf of the Chelsea, London-based nurserymen James Veitch & Sons. In 1906, a third trip was suggested, this time on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts, USA [53].

The trip was organised by Professor Sargent, but it was Ellen Ann Willmott who reputedly convinced Wilson - a recently married new father - to go, providing him with the much-needed encouragement and some of the cash necessary for the two-year expedition. She apparently also offered him advice on photography [54].

So great was the amount of money Miss Willmott spent on her three gardens and her hobbies that, by the following spring, her personal fortune had dwindled to the point that she was forced to borrow money.

‘I have always been greatly impressed by your expenditure and thought that only a millionaire could afford it...the way to get into trouble is to have several homes,' William Robinson wrote to her in August 1910 [55].

In March 1907, using much of Warley as collateral, Willmott borrowed £15,000 from John James Stokes, a senior partner in her father's old law firm and J.G. Tasker, a presumed cousin of the Countess Tasker [56].

A month later, in April, Narcissus ‘Miss Willmott', raised by van Tubergen and shown by Messrs Walter T. Ware of Inglescombe, Bath, won a RHS Award of Merit. Also in that year, Willmott joined the Essex Field Club for which she led an annual summer tour of Warley's gardens.

By late 1907, Wilson had sent Willmott numerous seeds of herbaceous plants and she also received hundreds of packets of seeds of shrubs and trees via the Arnold Arboretum.

Unfortunately, an accidental fire at Tresserve in the autumn of 1907 destroyed the house and most of the contents. The restoration cost her dearly. In December, she borrowed a further £3,000 from Stokes and Tasker [57].

The December 1907 issue of The Garden, however, must have given her some comfort. Itcontained a copy of her portrait in pastel, attributed to Signora Gutti, and a dedication praising her for ‘her great knowledge so freely given and her enthusiasm in promoting a love of flowers and their ways in this and other countries'.

Another dedication to Miss Willmott appeared in the Botanical Magazine. It reproduced a portrait of her in oil and read:

‘to Miss Ellen Ann Willmott, FLS, VHM, of Warley Place, Essex, whose skill in gardening is only surpassed by the generosity in which she dispenses the treasures of her gardens and accords to others the benefits of her experience this volume is gratefully dedicated.' [58]

Plant collecting

Meliosma veitchiorum at Warley, introduced by Ernest WilsonBetween 1907 and 1911, Wilson continued to send Willmott numerous seeds as well as bulbs, shrubs and herbaceous plants, from China. Many of these through her intelligent experiment, patience and care were successfully raised and brought into a flourishing condition at her gardens, whereas at the Arnold Arboretum, Kew and other places that had received the same shipments, they failed to prosper.

Willmott, for her success with these plant imports, soon gained the reputation of being able to bring the rarest and most precious plants to the point at which they could be shown more quickly and better than anyone else in the country [60]. She was, for example, the only gardener to have successfully raised certain varieties of Wilson's Helwingia and Sabia [61].

Willmott raised a Himalayan plumbago, Ceratostigma willmottanum, from seeds obtained on Wilson's third trip. Only two seeds germinated, one at Warley and the other at Spetchley. Corylopsis willmottiae and Rosa willmottiae were both discovered by Wilson in 1908 in western Szechuan on his Chinese plant-hunting expeditions.

In addition to Asia, Miss Willmott also supported collectors in South Africa. ‘I have a man collecting Pelargonium for me out on the Cape,' she wrote in 1902 [62]. This was Gerald Davidson who sent rare pelargoniums to her hothouses.

For many years, Willmott was in frequent communication not just with her American, South African and Eastern contacts, but also with botanic gardens and gardeners in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, paying them visits and exchanging plants, seeking their aid in keeping her collections correctly named.

‘I am quite alone with nothing to think about but plants and gardening,' she wrote from Tresserve to Professor Sargent in 1908 [63].

In 1908, after trials at Wisley, Dahlia ‘Miss Willmott', sent by Codsall nurserymen Messrs Bakers, was highly commended.

Also in 1908, Reginald Farrer, an expert alpine grower and plant hunter, gave his - mostly positive - opinion of the Alpine garden at Warley. In his book My Rock Garden, he comments:

‘At Warley, again, there is the Gorge-design to be studied - to my own personal taste, a trifle too violent to be altogether pleasant, but still a noble example of definite purpose definitely carried out.' [64]

Around 1904 to 1909, the daffodils Ellen Ann Willmott had been showing in the early 1900s entered into the trade (Messrs. Walter T. Ware of Inglescombe, Bath was her agent 1908-1911) [65]. Miss Willmott gradually ceased daffodil hybridisation activities and turned her attention to the bulbs and seeds Wilson had been sending her from China [66]. In early 1909, a large shipment of rhododendron and rose seeds arrived. Willmott sold her share of the rhododendrons to Gauntletts' nursery in Chiddingfold and gave Primula viscosa and primrose hybrid sets she had been experimenting with to Kew, Edinburgh and Dublin [67].

Publications

Up to this point, in terms of her publications, Willmott had merely contributed information and photographs to other people's texts, such as Gertrude Jekyll's Roses for English Gardens (1902) and Children and Gardens (1908), the Reverend Charles Casey's Riviera Nature Notes (1903) and William Robinson's Alpine Flowers for Gardens (1903).

In 1909, following her previous success in this area, she published her own book of photographs, which she dedicated to her sister Rose, entitled Warley Gardens in Spring and Summer, published by Quaritch. In it, Miss Willmott demonstrated her knowledge of both gardening and photography.

A year later, she published the first part of a monograph on the rose, a genus of which she was considered to be, by many at the time, an authoritative figure. The nurseryman Correvon judged her collection one of the best in Britain and she grew them at La Boccanegra as well.

Miss Willmott began to prepare the book around 1901, which involved several years of prolonged, careful study and detailed, patient observation. Much of the work was based on her practical experience of crossing roses as well as the extensive knowledge she gained through reading the theoretical, practical, modern and historical botanical and horticultural works she had been collecting [68].

‘I have worked upon roses all my life and the difficulties are insurmountable. I have over and over again felt I was nearing some satisfactory classification and then fresh material has set me astray again,' she wrote [69].

Willmott spent years bringing about 140 different species of her roses into flower, producing material for the book at her own expenditure.

‘I should be only too glad if I could get some help, but as I wish nothing spared which can contribute to the perfection of the book I must do it myself,' she wrote [70].

Willmott's book, The Genus Rosa, was issued in 25 parts and in two volumes. The first parts of volume one were published in September 1910. Its debut was, however, a tremendous disappointment for Willmott and John Murray the publishers, as only 260 of the 1,000 copies produced were sold [71].

The suggestion for the book seems to have come from Canon Ellacombe, whom Willmott thanks in her preface along with Colonel David Prain, the director of Kew [72]. The book was dedicated to Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother [73].

It contained geographical, historical and horticultural notes, written by Willmott herself, set alongside coloured plates drawn by the landscape painter and botanical illustrator Alfred Parsons, RA and purely botanical text written by John Gilbert Baker from Kew.

The multi-coloured lithographed illustrations, based on drawing by Parsons, alone cost more than the profits from the book's sale.

Critical acclaim

In 1911, Correvon, who had earlier praised Willmott's garden at Warley Place, published his approval of her European gardens and recent gardening activities.

‘I have described elsewhere the splendid gardens at Warley Place. In them a true artist displays her accurate and deep knowledge of plants- I except none- united to astonishing experience of practical gardening. Miss Willmott is unquestionably the amateur, who in England (and consequently in all the world) has the best knowledge of bulbs and hardy plants. She has inherited the traditions of the Rev. Wolley Dod and Sir Michael Foster, whose unique collection of Iris and bulbs, the most beautiful and complete in existence, was given to her by the owner. The cause of gardening claims all her ability, erudition, fortune and talents, and, like Queen Anne, the only title Miss Willmott cares to claim is that of gardener. Than the collections of hardy plants at Warley and at Tresserve, on the shore of Lake Bourget, nothing more comprehensive is to be found. The manor-house of Warley lies in one of the sunniest and driest parts of England. The grounds were laid out and planted toward the end of the seventeenth century by the celebrated writer Evelyn. Here in surroundings naturally diversified a valley has been excavated by the chatelaine, and in this artificial valley an excellent rock-garden built, traversed by a mimic Alpine stream. The whole is planted with an exhaustive and world-wide collection of mountain flora, well worthy of the cosmopolitan reputation which it has so quickly won.' [74]

Wilson, who visited Willmott at Warley, in 1911 reported back to the Arnold Arboretum in August that year that Willmott had been wonderfully successful with seeds and plants which no one else had managed to raise. Before he left, he also wrote to Ellen Ann informing her himself that ‘I accepted the work on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum was due more largely to your influence than possibly you and others are aware of.' [75]

Also in 1911, Willmott presented Kew with a herbarium she had bought from Alexis Jordan. In April, Narcissus ‘Miss Willmott', raised by van Tubergen and shown by Messrs Walter T. Ware of Inglecombe, Bath, won a first class certificate.

More awards followed in 1912 after she let go head gardener James Preece, whose work was taken over by Fielder [76]. These were all for plants introduced by Wilson from China. Corylopsis warleyensis, discovered in 1908, was accorded a RHS Award of Merit in March. Primula warleyensis received an RHS Award of Merit in April. Deutzia longfolia and Lilium warleyensis received first class certificates in July. Willmott gained a botanical certificate for Deinanthe caerulea and an RHS Award of Merit for Patrina palmate. Later in 1912, Fielder left to go work for the RHS full time. Around this time, Chandler left Warley for a job at Medmenham.

It was at this stage, that Ellen Ann Willmott starting singing in the Bach choir, having been introduced to them first in 1911 and having attended their meetings. So great was her love of this activity, that she is reported to have slept on benches in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, in order to save a night's lodging on the way to Oxford, and to have spent the night in a police lock-up (voluntarily) having been found asleep on the top step of the Judges' Lodgings at Oxford, after a concert [77].

In 1912, naturalist J.C. Shenstone described the garden at Warley in detail, informing readers that it was open once a year to the public for a charge collected at the entrance gate, the profits for which were given to a local charity.

According to her own letters, Willmott was by that year still supplying the trade with daffodils and attending narcissi committee meetings.

Also in 1912, following the publication of the early parts of The Genus Rosa, the Society Nationale D'Acclimatation de France bestowed upon her the honour of the Grande Medaille d'Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire [78].

Other awards followed including, in 1913, a RHS Award of Merit for ‘Warley Hybrid' and others. Lysionotus warleyensis, collected by Wilson in China, was given a RHS Award of Merit in August 1913. There were a number of awards of merit in 1914, including one for the Warley rose [79].

However, Primula spectabilis ‘Warley Variety', shown in April 1913, failed to impress the judges, as did Primula capiata ‘Warley Variety' when shown in November 1913.

Financial worries

By this time it was no longer possible for Miss Willmott to set aside her money problems. In 1913 she was threatened with bankruptcy and forced to begin selling her possessions and even to let a number of staff, including gardeners, go. She sold one of her Amati violins, together with a Stradivarius, and, though unsuccessful, in March tried to let some of the unoccupied properties at Warley and La Boccanegra [80].

Despite her financial troubles, Willmott continued to keep in touch with a variety of botanical gardeners [81], including those at the Botanic Gardens at Dublin (1915) and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh (1900-1930). She also exchanged plants with a California nurseryman, Carl Purdy, in 1912 [82].

In 1913, Miss Willmott was invited to a reception to mark the bicentennial of the Imperial Gardens in St. Petersburg, Russia and was in correspondence with the palace gardener at Sofia. Lievre, in her 1980 biography of Willmott, also tells the story 'with no date and no details attached to it, but yet bearing the ring of truth that Ellen Willmott was asked by the emperor of Japan to go and lay out a garden for him - a matter of enormous interest, and extremely lucrative - but that she turned it down because she had too much to do in Europe.' [83]

Remains of the conservatory at Warley PlaceIn March 1914, the final part of volume two of Ellen Ann Willmott's The Genus Rosa was published [84]. The set became the standard work on the subject and further perpetuated Willmott's name in the annals of botany and horticulture.

In April, Willmott's Anemone pulsatilla, shown at the RHS, did not impress the judges. Neither did her Rhododendron warleyense or R. willmottiae, nor her Veronica prostrate, also shown at Chelsea that year. Her Verbascum ‘Warley Rose', however received a RHS Award of Merit.

The same month, Arthur Forster, of Frere Cholmeley's, persuaded Lord Lilford to take over Willmott's £18,000 mortgage [85]. This was a stroke of luck for her as the following June her father's old law firm, with whose partners part of her original mortgage was held, went bankrupt [86]. However it was soon realised that Tresserve would have to be sold to repay Lord Lilford.

A disagreement with E.A. Bowles

That same year, E.A. Bowles, of Myddelton House, near Enfield, published the first of his trilogy, My Garden in Spring. The preface, written by his friend, Reginald Farrer, ridiculed show-off rock gardens:

‘This is a mosaic, this is a gambol in purple and gold; but it is not a rock garden, though tin chamois peer never so frequent from its cliffs upon the passer-by, bewildered with such a glare of expensive magnificence.' [87]

Ellen Ann Willmott and Frank Crisp, the owner of Friar Park and senior member of the London based law firm Ashurst, Morris, Crisp & Co., to whom some of the comments were felt to be directed, took tremendous offence. Instead of blaming Farrer, though, they took it out on Bowles, Crisp quickly publishing a pamphlet, entitled Mr E.A. Bowles and his garden, a New Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, and Miss Willmott distributing it from a bookmaker's leather bag at the Chelsea Flower Show that year. [88]

Such was the - at times - tempestuous relationship between Bowles and Willmott, that Farrer is reported to have that year written to Bowles that he (Bowles) should: ‘marry the cankered Ellen at once and save further trouble.' [89]

The pamphlet was later reproduced in Gardening Illustrated, and Bowles responded with a letter to William Robinson, then editor. By March the row had blown over, with Bowles inviting Willmott to his garden to help herself to some of his plants [90].

World War One

Up until 1914, Ellen Ann Willmott had been very fortunate in having been able to indulge her horticultural energies, as well as her other scientific and artistic delights, to the full. Just prior to World War One, she still had enough gardeners to keep the grounds at Warley in a good state, and is said to have grown over 100,000 different species and cultivars of flowering plants, shrubs and trees there.

As her bank debts mounted, Miss Willmott's sister, Rose was hospitalised and diagnosed with cancer in July 1914. This was followed, a month or so later, by the outbreak of war. The appearance of The Genus Rosa, just before the war, drastically reduced its sales. In October 1914, a glowing review of it by Jekyll appeared, perhaps to try to help boost its popularity.

Several of Willmott's gardeners left Warley to fight in the war. So tight was money becoming for her, that she was forced to break her promise to the wife of Gooch the gardener to be able to live rent-free on the estate while Gooch himself fought in the Great War [91]. Regular postcards were received from Clodoveo to keep her up to date with what was happening at Boccanegra.

By May 1915, Willmott's financial troubles had come to a head. She had no income. She consulted Frank Crisp, who lent her money against the security of her Italian property and tried to round up other friends, including William Robinson, to contribute to the running costs of Warley, which stood at approximately £253 a week [92].

‘It is these next few weeks. I am in a pretty bad hole for the moment,' she wrote to Frank Crisp [93].

In June Campanula pusills ‘Miss Willmott', shown by Stevenage nurseryman, Mr Clarence Elliot, won a RHS Award of Merit. Plagianthus lyalli ‘Warley Variety', however, failed to impress the judges in July.

It was around this time that the army took over Warley Lea and Shenfield Lodge and Willmott started, sadly, to find that much of her beautiful planting was being destroyed at the houses on the estate she had leased [94].

The same year, to try to raise some capital, Willmott contemplated starting a gardening school. Since the early 1900s, she had been a patroness of Lady Wolseley's Gylde School of Gardening (founded in 1901-2). She consulted her friend Cecile Gradwell over the matter and started putting her plans into action with a Mrs Scott. [95]

In 1916, at the same time she was given a super-tax form to fill out, the banks began to demand payment of outstanding loans. Around May, Barclays Bank sent Miss Willmott a letter stating their intention to repossess her belongings and to take over Warley.

‘When that awful letter came I went out weeding, as the only way to bring me a little relief. Being RC the two ways that are often chosen, making away with oneself, or drowning misery in drink, are not allowed to us and indeed neither way appeals to me...I have not said a word to a soul nor shall I do so just wait until the awful thing comes and then go through with all the horrors and not let anyone know that I mind...' she wrote to Miss Gilpin. [96]

The last of her bonds in the Argentine Railway were sold in May to clear her debts to other banks, the London Joint Company and Midland [97]. In the same month, more of her gardeners, including Austin, left Warley for military service [98].

Warley under threat

In June, Arthur Forster presented Willmott with an ultimatum. Unless she could start her school, or find a paying guest who could contribute £1,000 a year, she would have to pack up and leave Warley. [99]

Forster informed her of the options available to her: either sell Warley by auction or sell the contents to partially pay the mortgage and gain some income. Lord Lilford gave her two to three weeks to arrange a lease for the garden and farm, find paying guests or shut the house and seek a buyer.

In a last effort to save Warley for Willmott, Forster told Rose Berkeley - by then very ill - of her older sister's financial predicaments. Rose suggested Willmott rent out everything, besides the mansion lodges and red house, and sell a few things here and there, as well as the produce of the garden, to add income. She offered to contribute a small income herself to help Ellen Ann with her expenses.

The matter was left to Forster, Lilford and Rose to sell what ‘things' Willmott could part with ‘here and there' and the war was offered up as a public excuse for Willmott's reduced state of living.

‘I am sure you won't like my advice but surely it is worth making a supreme effort now to straighten matters, and you can well put it down to the War,' Rose wrote to her sister [100].

A rumour soon spread afterward that much of Willmott's inherited wealth had been invested in Germany before the war, and thus was lost. However, with her sister's help, the sale of Warley Place, and its contents, was thankfully averted.

Throughout the war period, the garden was staffed by Jacob Maurer and a few others. His work in the Alpine garden, Chinese garden, Japanese garden and fern cave at Warley was visited by Kew, by learned societies, and by botanist's royals.

Seed lists were still being produced at Warley, and consignments sent out, despite the shortage of labour.

‘I have been talking to my only man left.. everything is so difficult in war time and I am at my wits' end sometimes how to manage' Miss Willmott wrote to A.W. Hill in 1918 [101].

During the war, there had been female gardeners at Warley, but not after [102]. Although she trained some female gardeners (Lievre notes a Yella Bullion, who later laid out a garden for Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and a Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, who went on to raise plants in Greece), Miss Willmott seems to have had a low opinion of women gardeners. In a letter to her friend, Miss Beatrix Havergal, founder and Principal of the Waterperry Horticultural Training School for Women (1932), Miss Willmott aired her view that young lady gardeners were both ‘utterly hopeless and unsafe in the borders'. [103]

Most of Willmott’s societies continued their meetings during the war years, and between 1914 and 1924, Ellen Ann continued to judge the York shows.

In 1916, Salvia warleyensis received an Award of Merit, although Verbascum ‘Warley Pearl' was passed over by the Committee in June that year.

In June 1917, Syringa ‘Miss Ellen Willmott', shown by Mr C. Turner and Mr G. Paul won an Award of Merit. In September 1917, Ceratogstigma willmottianum, raised by Willmott from seed collected by Wilson in western China and sent from the Arnold Arboretum, won her a RHS Award of Merit.

By 1917 debts at Tresserve, however, had mounted to 15,000 francs. [104]

The post-war years

In August 1918 Violet Douglas-Pennant, who had a few months earlier been appointed commandant of the Women's Royal Air Force, was dismissed without ample reason being given. The event caused much publicity and public sympathy.

The case of her dismissal was debated in both houses of Parliament and, between 1919 and 1929, sparked a pamphlet war, judicial enquiry and several libel suits.

Miss Willmott herself felt that what had happened to Pennant was an injustice, an injury to a woman because she was a woman. She thus often went to London to attend meetings of a committee dedicated to restoring Pennant's good name, and they became great friends [105].

Towards the end of the war, in 1918 Willmott had indeed found paying guests - Sir Francis and Lady Younghusband - although they left shortly after the war ended. However she still had army tenants at the Glen and the Croft. After the war, some of Miss Willmott's surviving gardeners returned to Warley.

In 1919, Willmott again put her own hand to writing, contributing two chapters to A. W. Hill's Henry Nicholson Ellacombe, A Memoir (1919): an account of Robert Lucas de Pearsall, the musician, and the Ellacombes, and Canon Ellacombe and his Plants [106].

In May 1919, Paeonia willmottiae, collected by Wilson in Hupeh in 1900 and raised at Warley was awarded a RHS First Class Certificate.

In addition to other people's publications, Ellen Ann Willmott sometimes also advised others on their gardens' design and planting.

In June 1919, Miss Willmott, ‘Gold Medallist of the Royal Horticultural Society' was appointed a member of the Committee to consider the alterations to Hampton Court Palace Gardens which consisted also of: Sir Aston Webb, President of the Royal Academy, Chairman, Colonel F. R. S. Balfour, nominated by the Royal Horticultural Society, Mr. W. Watson, Curator of Kew Gardens, nominated by the Director, Mr. Robert Wallace, landscape gardener, and Mr Ernest Law, the Historian of Hampton Court. [107]

In January 1920, Lady Menzies, who had since 1913 rented La Boccanegra periodically, asked Willmott for a 15-year lease and purchase price for the property. The gardens by this stage were in a dreadful state, with dying and dead plants. Lady Menzies did not get the property and the house and gardens were sold to Tremaynes [108].

Earlier that year, Willmott was offered 40,000 francs for the chateau at Tresserve. However, Lord Berkeley stepped in to offer her more for it and to help her finances further [109].

Despite these changes in fortune, and the selling off of her continental properties in the early 1920s, Hamptons tried to let Warley Place. Luckily for Miss Willmott, they were unsuccessful [110]. Although they advertised the upcoming sale by auction of Warley in 11 lots in June 1920, in May a postponement was issued [111].

Miss Willmott averted the sale of Warley by heeding her younger sister Rose's advice. In May, Apple Tree Cottage was advertised for rent, and in July, Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge auctioned off some of Willmott's music and art collections. Her engravings and drawings were auctioned on Tuesday 20 July. The harpsichord she had received as a 16th birthday present from her father (earlier a present from Queen Charlotte to Princess Amelia), a number of Chippendale chairs and panels of Oudenarde tapestry, plus other items, went on sale on Friday 12 November [112].

In the early 1920s, Miss Willmott advised Ernest Law and the trustees at Shakespeare's Gardens, New Place, Stratford upon Avon on the planting of the wilderness bank in the Great Garden there and in 1924-5 on the improvement of the orchard hedges in Anne Hathaway's Cottage garden, also at Stratford.

During the mid 1920s, she also continued her experiments with primula and roses and resumed judging at rose shows, often accompanying Queen Alexandra.

In early 1921, Willmott's mortgage was transferred from Lord Lilford to Lord Berkeley. It had been reduced from the sales of Tresserve and Boccanegra and the profits from this may have been used to pay off her Barclay's bank loans [114].

Also in 1921, in the 13th edition of his English Flower Garden, William Robinson wrote of the garden Miss Willmott, her parents and sister had helped to create:

‘I think I have had more pleasure from the little square garden at Warley, full of hardy flowers, both in beds and borders, than ever I had in any garden.' [115]

By 1921, Willmott presented to Kew her 15,000-sheet ‘herbarium warleyense', collected and purchased by her from various - mostly European - sources. She wrote to Alice de Rothschild that she intended never to go abroad again.

On 21 August 1922, however, Ellen Ann's sister Rose died, two days after Willmott's 64th birthday.

‘...now there is no one to send the first snow drops to.' Ellen Ann wrote to the Rusells. [116]

In 1923, she appears to have found that someone in Norah Lindsay, whom she visited at her gardens in Sutton Courtenay, where they shared ideas. Miss Willmott encouraged Lindsay to study the habitat needs of each plant closely and to plant the ‘right plant in the right place' for ensured success. She also left behind her trademark Eryngium giganteum seeds and promised to dispatch a small selection of plants from Warley as she had done for Spetchley [117].

A year later, in 1924, Ellen Ann became the first woman to hold the Royal National Rose Society Dean Hole Medal. Her book of photographs, Warley Gardens in Spring and Summer, dedicated to Rose, went into a second edition [118].

In May 1924, after trials at Wisley, her Cheiranthus ‘Ellen Willmott', sent by Messrs Watkins and Simpson, was highly commended.

She dined in London with Ernest Law in early 1924 and later took on his cook as her housekeeper.

In August 1925, Campanula ‘Warley Alba', shown by Hampshire nurserymen Messrs Prichard, won a RHS Award of Merit. Iris ‘Miss Willmott' received no award, however, at its 1925-7 trial at Wisley.

An eccentric old lady

Ellen Ann Willmott appears to have become more eccentric as she got older. In the late 1920s, she is noted to have fitted alarm bells to all the window shutters at Warley and alarmed the strong room where the gold and silver medals she had won at shows were kept.

When she went to London during these years she wore a diamond brooch on her hat and several rings and carried a revolver in her handbag to protect both them and herself from thieves [117]. Where once she would have had the King and Queen for tea with bottles of wine from Tresserve on the table for dinner, now she entertained Peter Coats with only a jug of Bovril between them [120].

On one of the late February mornings in 1928, when Willmott usually went to London to help add her voice of support to the case of Violet Douglas- Pennant, she nipped into a store to pick up a few things: one of the rare occasions she went in to buy rather than sell accessories.

Upon leaving the store, Galeries Lafayette at 190 Regent Street, Willmott was followed by a store detective. Having lost the receipt for her purchases, she was arrested, charged with theft and subsequently jailed for one night. When brought up at Marlborough Street police court, she was defended by Sir Henry Curtis Bennet and had character witnesses in Lord Stamfordham, the Lord Lieutenant and Chief Constable of Essex - the one phone call she was allowed having been made to the Queen. Her case was swiftly acquitted, after which, it is said, she ‘delivered an impassioned speech on women’s rights.’ [121]

Not content with acquital and wanting instead public acknowledgement of the falsity of the charges, Willmott sued the store for damages and false imprisonment. She won her civil case, defended by Lord Erligh, and later received a full apology from her accusers in open court, together with out-of-pocket expenses.

The settlement for the civil action lawsuit brought against the Galeries Lafayette, for their mistaken charge of shoplifting and alleged false imprisonment and malicious prosecution, was announced in the papers in 1929 [122]. After the trial, however, her finances again took a turn for the worse and on her trips to London she sold various pieces of jewellery to try to make ends meet [123].

During the late 1920s, the orchid house at Warley had to be abandoned and the packing and posting of plants gradually came to an end, though seed lists were still sent out.

Miss Willmott was pursued by Romford Council for payment of rates, but this problem was solved after an intervention by Lord Lambourne, Lord Lieutenant of Essex. William Robinson also persevered in trying to sort out Miss Willmott's financial affairs.

In May 1928, Willmott won a RHS Award of Merit for ‘Warley Rose'. In 1928, the same award was also given to her for Ceratostigma willmottianum, raised from seed collected by Wilson sent from the Arnold Arboretum.

In the 1930s, Willmott remained still active in conferences, meetings and events, though no longer competing for awards. She was elected to the RHS Floral Committee (group B) in 1930 and both she and Robinson attended the Chelsea Flower Show together in 1931.

Willmott continued to attend RHS shows, often with plant specimens in her button holes, for people to try to identify.

‘...we were all glad to see Miss Willmott back again: she was wearing Pentapterigonum rugosum with striated flowers like Roman glass' reported Sir William Lawrence at the RHS autumn show in 1932. [124]

In 1932, Miss Willmott gave her lathe and a number of tools to the Lewis Evans collection at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford [125]. She also joined the Alpine Society.

When Gertrude Jekyll died in December 1932, Willmott attended the funeral with William Robinson. That month, Sir William Lawrence, ‘Resolutions and Wishes', in Garden Illustrated, 31 December sent her the following New Year's wishes:

‘To Miss Willmott...and to all the ladies who demonstrate that you can be at once a good gardener and a charming woman, a Happy New Year.' [126]

The following year, 1933, Ellen Ann Willmott was elected to the RHS Lily Committee and attended the Lily conference that year. She was 75. In the same year she presented her prized Holtzapffel lathe to the University of Oxford, which had earlier been on view at the old Ashmolean building near her collection of craftsmen tools (earlier for several years on public exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum). She apparently, however, removed a part of the lathe to make it unusable for others [127].

During the 1930s, the gardens at Warley and its rarities, such as the ‘headache tree' Umbellularia californica, was still drawing visitors, the Alpine garden remained unchanged and the lawns were still kept beautiful. The Essex Field Club was still visiting annually, and being led around the gardens by Miss Willmott up to three months before her death.

That year she wrote her last letter to Kew asking if a particular species of Sorbus, which Kew had never seen in flower, if not in the herbarium, might bear her name or Warley's. In the end Kew named it Sorbus sargentianavar. warleyens, as it was held to be identical to Wilson's no. 3492 (Veitch) [128].

In 1934, Miss Willmott sang her last song in the Bach choir. She died suddenly of an atheroma and embolus of the coronary artery a few months later on 27 September 1934 at Warley. Her body was taken to the church of Holy Cross and All Saints on Warley Hill where Requiem mass was sung. Her coffin was covered with flowers from the Warley garden and was taken to Brentwood churchyard.

Miss Willmott's grave, Brentwood, EssexEllen Ann Willmott was laid to rest on 1 October in her father's grave, which was lined with evergreens and laurels gathered from the grounds by Jacob Maurer [129]. To her father's memorial the words were added: ‘pray for the repose of the soul of Ellen Ann Willmott of Warley Place died 27 September 1934' [130].

A memorial service was held on 2 October in Farm Street Roman Catholic Church. Probate was granted to Robert Berkeley on 4 December [131].

In 1935, Rosa ‘Ellen Willmott', raised by Mr W. E. B. Archer, was given a Certificate of Merit from the National Rose society.

Lasting reputation

Ellen Ann Willmott's name is perpetuated in the annals of botany and horticulture not only by her ambitious and sumptuous work The Genus Rosa, but by the lists of garden plants that have been permanently enriched by her introduction of many fine species. Her memory is enshrined in the willmottiae and warleyensis hybrids of narcissus, primula, roses, shrubs and tulips that fill our gardens today and in the tall, elegant, silvery blue thistly-headed form of sea holly, Eryngium giganteum, known colloquially as ‘Miss Willmott's Ghost.'

‘Surely there can be no other woman horticulturalist with such a long and impressive list of plants named for her or for her home,' commented Ken Lemmon [132].

She is described by her contemporaries as a woman of great physical stamina, even in her later years. She is said, when visiting friends' gardens, to have walked back and forth from the station ‘as often as not with a knapsack of plants on her shoulders' and to have been a visitor worth having [133]. She would walk for considerable distances to get to other people's gardens, and was likely to carry off in her knapsack as much as she could of the soil in which the plants she took were found [134]. In these gardens, as at Sutton, she is also known to have scattered seeds to later remind her garden hosts of her visit.

Miss Willmott was also remembered as a capable musician and attendant at several scientific meetings. ‘In all fields in which she took an interest she was untiring in her pursuit of knowledge and she will be greatly missed in all those spheres of public and private life which owe so much to her interest and many activities,' the author of her obituary in Kew's Bulletin wrote.[135]

The magazine, Nature said: 'Scientific gardeners are rare in any age, and the good work accomplished by Ellen Willmott in scientific horticulture during her long life will be remembered and appreciated for centuries to come.' [136]

Warley Place, ‘the well-known garden of the late Miss E.A. Willmott' , was put up for sale by auction on 28 May with its ‘William and Mary residence with entrance lodges stabling glasshouses outbuildings garden and parkland of 45 acres Warley place farm of 26 acres.' [137]

The contents of Warley Place, including early English, French, Italian and Spanish furniture, a collection of early musical instruments, valuable oil paintings, a library of interesting books and portfolios, and outdoor effects including motor and hand mowing machines and other garden tools, were sold by a week-long auction that began on 30 May [138.].

Many of Willmott's plants were moved to Spetchley. Robert Berkeley reputedly invited Kew to take what they wanted, but they never came. Afterwards, many plants were plundered.

The house was sold, and permission sought to turn it into a luxury housing estate, but this was not achieved. It was demolished in 1939 and the garden itself reverted to wilderness. It was later leased from the grandson of the 1939 purchaser to the Essex Naturalist Trust (later Essex Wildlife Trust) in 1977, and has since then been transformed into a nature reserve, while retaining as many as possible of the features of Miss Willmott's original garden [139].

Endnotes

The author would like to thank John Cannell of the Essex Wildlife Trust for supplying many of the visual documents used in this article.

1) Frederick and Ellen were married on 15 May 1856 in Hammersmith, London by the Reverend D. O'Keefe. Jackson's Oxford Journal (Oxford, England), Saturday, 24 May 1856, Issue 5378. They had been wed almost a year when Ellen Ann was born.

2) She was, however, not their first child. Their first child, a son, was conceived a year earlier, yet had died prematurely, still born 10 June 1857. ‘Birth, Death, Marriages and Obituaries', The Morning Chronicle, (London, England), Saturday 13 June 1857.

3) ‘Advertisement', The Times, Monday 14 May 1855, p. 4.

4) For further details, see 'Heston and Isleworth: Schools', in Reynolds, Susan, (editor), A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 3: Victoria County History, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1962), pp. 133-137.

5) Miss Helen Tasker showed 582 Flowers from nature as an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy in 1840. See Graves, Algernon, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors, vol. 7 (London: Henry Graves and Co. Ltd., 1906), p. 322. Between 1840 and 1843, she also exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists.

6) ‘Obituary', The Times, Thursday, 8 March 1888, p. 14. She donated money for the building of the Church of Holy Cross and All Saints, Warley Hill, in 1881, the architect of which was Francis William Tasker, a cousin. See 'Great Warley', in Powell, W.R. (editor), A History of the County of Essex: Volume 7 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1978), pp. 163-174.

8) ‘Advertisement', The Times, Saturday 25 September 1875, p. 12 and also, The Sporting Gazette (London, England), Saturday, 30 October, 1875, p. 1089. The house was described as being built during the reign of William and Mary (1688-1702). According to Pevsner, it was probably rebuilt by Gandon in 1777. See Pevnser, Nicholas, Buildings of England: Essex (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 431 and 'Great Warley', in Powell, W.R. (editor), A History of the County of Essex: Volume 7, Victoria County History, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer,1978), pp. 163-174. It was greatly enlarged by the Willmotts. For further contemporary descriptions of the house, as well as its possible Queen Anne origins, see the advertisements in The Times, Saturday 13 March 1920 and 18 April 1935, p. 26 as well as comments in The Times, Friday, 16 August 1935, p. 3.

9) ‘Advertisement', The Times, Thursday, 18 April 1935, p. 26.

10) See Correvon, Henry, and Philippe Robert, Alpine Flora, translated E.W. Clayforth (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1911), p. 242, The Times, Thursday 28 February 1935, p. 24 and ‘John Evelyn's Note', The Times, Wednesday 1 May 1935, p. 27. Evelyn sold the property on 17 September 1655 to a Mr. Hurt, the taxes on it ‘during our unnatural war' being, as he puts it, ‘so intolerable that they ate up all the rents, etc.' Evelyn, John, The Diary of John Evelyn, Volume I, ed. by William Bray (London: M. Walter Dunne Publisher, 1901), pp. 247 and 306.

13) Part of the secret of the entirely natural appearance of these carefully planted slopes was the manner of their planting: the gardeners' children were persuaded to throw handfuls of bulbs from a wheelbarrow over the ground. It was where they fell that they were planted and then there multiplied. In the same way she encouraged the crocus to spread and cover the lawns and fields in front of the house and also laid seed beneath the turf. Lièvre, p. 72.

14) ‘Miscellaneous Notes', p. 398. In the heyday of Warley there were 104 gardeners working from 6a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, Saturday until 4 p.m. for 18 s a week and 18s 6d for foreman. For a time these gardeners included: James Preece (head gardener), Jacob Maurer (foreman for Alpines), Thomas Candler (foreman for herbaceous plants), Messrs. Hayes, Gooch and Horton (foremen for vegetables and fruit), Mr. Goodwin (foreman for roses) and Mr. Dyer (foreman for chrysanthemums). Willmott devised a uniform for them consisting of green banned boaters, green silk ties and navy blue aprons. Lièvre, p. 93.

15) ‘Obituary', The Times, Friday 28 September 1934, p.16.

16) Willmott, Ellen, letter, 1916, quoted in Lièvre, p. 42.

17) ‘Obituary', The Times, Friday 28 September, op. cit.

18) Ibid.

19) Despite universities such as Girton College, Cambridge opening its doors (1869) to women for the first time during this period, Willmott does not appear to have received any university training nor, until well into her early twenties, to have had a governess. See Lièvre, p. 50.

27) Lièvre, p. 84. In 1888 in memory of Tasker a second aisle was added by the Willmotts to the Church of the Holy Cross and All Saints, Warley Hill. The church, known locally as Miss Willmott's, had been built in 1881 with money given by Tasker, designed by the latter's architect cousin, and had a lady's chapel furnished by both Tasker and Ellen Ann who, since 1884, had been the director of its choir. See Lièvre, p. 54.

28) Lièvre, pp. 67 and 80. Willmott was also very interested in science. She was a life member of the Royal Institution, an attendant at several scientific meetings, had both a telescope and a microscope, and was a keen black and white as well as colour photographer. She had her own darkroom at Warley. This was located close to the locked workroom where her lathe was kept. And, in it, Willmott produced plates and slides for giving magic lantern shows, including one of the eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius which she captured with her camera on her grand tour in 1888-9. See also Lièvre, p. 70 and 150.

29) From 1890, the Willmotts added 22 acres of land to the estate. The orchid house, hot frames, fern house and other greenhouses, to the north east of the house, were also probably all built in the 1890s. The wedding also prompted a head gardener, James Preece, formally of Lutton Hoo to be taken on, as well as a butler, James Robinson, formerly of Alnwick Castle and house keeper, Mrs Cullum. See Lièvre, p.95.For wedding announcement, see John Bull (London, England), Saturday, 27 June 1891, p. 416.

46) Several contemporary accounts credit Willmott with being the first woman to be elected a Linnaean fellow.

47) Lièvre, p. 120.

48) At a cost of 12,950 lire, see Lièvre, pp. 138-9. For her new gardens at Boccanegra, she bought considerable stock from the Hickel Brothers at Beaulieu sur Mer whom she used as landscape gardeners as well. She also bought from local suppliers, buying what flourished in the region, spending £2000 between 1905 and 1909 alone. She also furnished the house, hired a gardener and caretaker, Clodoveo (1909-1920), and usually only stayed there twice a year until the early 1920s.

71) Parts one to ten were sold by Murray for 21s net for the complete set. The Times, Saturday, 8 July 1911, p. 8.

72) Lièvre, p. 110, ‘but for the first I should never have undertaken the book at all but for the last it might never have reached the stage of publication'.

73) 1910 was the year the Queen's husband, King Edward VII, died. Queen Alexandra's second daughter, Princess Victoria, and later her daughter in law, Queen Mary, had often visited Warley. Edward Prince of Wales is recorded in the visitor book, alongside Albert and Mary, on 4 July 1909.

88) Lièvre, p.160. According to Ray Desmond, the person responsible for helping to construct the rock gardens at Friar Park was the same person responsible for helping to construct the rock gardens at Warley Place, the rock garden supervisor for James Backhouse, Richard Potter. See Desmond, Ray, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists: Including Plant Collectors, Flower Painters, and Garden Designers, 2nd revised edition (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), p. 560.

97) Lièvre, p. 178. These had been earlier purchased for her by her father in 1886.

98) Lièvre, p. 178.

99) Lièvre, p. 178.

100) Quoted in Lièvre, p.179.

101) Quoted in Lièvre, p.187.

102) Lièvre, p. 191.

103) Lièvre, p. 209.

104) Lièvre, p. 175.

105) She was abruptly dismissed from the service by Lord Weir on 28 August 1918 and refused to accept any other government post until her name had been cleared. See The Aeroplane, 15 January 1919, p. 308, House of Commons Debates, 16 April 1919 vol. 114 cc. 2894-6 , House of Lords Debate 20 November 1928 vol. 72 c.203, and ‘Lord Weir's Reason', Time Magazine, 27 July 1931. See also ‘The Douglas-Pennant Case', The Manchester Guardian, 3 July 1931. See also Lièvre, p. 199.

108) She had asked Alice de Rothschild if she would buy Boccanegra and tried also to borrow from her publisher John Murray.Lièvre, p. 190.

109) Lièvre, p. 190.

110) Warley was advertised as coming up for sale by auction in 11 lots on 13 March 1920 by Humbert and Flint and for sale by auction in 11 lots on Wednesday June 9th. See The Times Saturday 13 March 1920, Saturday 27 March, 17 April and Saturday 8 May.

Featured Sites

Gellidêg Mansion Wales, Llandyfaelog.
The site contains the ruins of a mid Victorian Italianate mansion. However this structure was built around an existing late Georgian house and its associated grounds which included a lodge, a walled garden with belvedere, a pond, stable block, flower gardens, pleasure gardens and parkland. The Victorian flower gardens associated with the mansion have not survived as such but the surrounding area has been replanted over the last fifty years with one of the best collections in the county of rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and magnolias. The original Georgian lodge together with the stable block, pond and the walled garden with its belvedere have survived.
The site is NOT NORMALLY OPEN to the public. However, tours can be available on application by contacting Captain & Mrs E C Atkinson on 091267 267 751.

Dumbleton Hall England, Evesham.
Dumbleton Hall has a pleasure ground providing gentle exercise on the north side of a valley, rising to mixed woodland. Two straight, crossing paths frame more naturalistic grassed areas, and there is a two-hectare lake with rhododendron fringe.
The Hall is now a hotel and conference centre and the grounds are open to guests.

Restoration House England, Rochester.
Restoration House is a grade I listed mansion of medieval origin with an enclosed, interconnecting, walled and terraced garden which forms an integral part of the mansion’s historic architecture. Significant surviving features, supported by archaeological evidence, pay testament to the garden’s historic integrity, and these include the remains of rare, late medieval to early Tudor stone walls, and a late Tudor diaper-brick wall. There are five distinct areas of the garden: a small front garden to the west of the house; two interlinked walled areas immediately to the east of the house which together form the immediate rear garden; a walled area to the south of this, currently (2014) being laid out as an enclosed, late Renaissance-style water garden; a further walled area to the far east currently (2014) planned as a new orchard.

Little Onn Hall England, Stafford.
Little Onn has a late-19th-century hall with later additions, close to an earlier medieval moated site. The gardens were laid out by Thomas Mawson and include terraces, a tennis court, a summerhouse, rose garden and some woodland planting.

Grassington Hall England, Wharfedale.
Grassington Hall is reputedly the oldest inhabited house in the Dales, with parts of the building dating from the 13th century. It was refurbished during the 19th century, and many of the present garden features date from this time. Features include a tree-lined entrance drive, walled kitchen garden and a modern terrace.

Eastgate House Gardens, Rochester England, Kent.
Eastgate House is a fine Tudor property built in 1591. The garden to the rear was made by Sir Guy Dawber in the 1920s but was substantially altered in 1983 to feature Dickens' chalet which was brought to the site in 1961. There are four main areas of the garden: the first and second occupy the south-eastern third of the site and form both an ornamental setting for the pedestrian path and front gardens for the house and the Community Hub building; the third and fourth form an enclosed garden and lie to the north and north-east.

Town Hall Gardens, Chatham England, Rochester.
Town Hall Gardens are 19th-century public gardens in the town centre. The site was previously used as the cemetery for St Mary's church. Elements of the early C20 design, which was conventional, probably survive in the tree planting, as do a number of early C19 trees which contribute to the aesthetic of the Gardens by reflecting, with the headstones, their earlier use as a burial ground.

Inveresk House Scotland, Musselburgh.
The Inveresk House landscape today represents the remains of a larger landscape probably laid out in the late-18th century, although there has been a house on this site since the 17th century. Much of the north of the landscape has been lost to development and the balance is in divided residential ownership.

Muirfield Gate Scotland, Gullane.
Muirfield Gate is a two acre Arts and Crafts-style villa and garden created by architect Sydney Mitchell at the turn of the century as his own home. Recent restoration works to both house and garden have included the reinstatement of Mitchell's 'flower corridor', a structure unique in Scotland. Some additional housing has been inserted into the landscape in the mid-20th century.

Stoneyhill House Scotland, Musselburgh.
The site has the remnants of a house with once expansive walled gardens, which date back to at least the mid-17th century. Stoneyhill House is now surrounded by the later development and expansion of Musselburgh.

Penllergare Wales, Swansea.
Penllergare is a partially surviving 19th-century Picturesque and Romantic landscape created by John Dillwyn Llewelyn, a nationally important figure in horticulture.
There are numerous contemporary photographs of the site, taken by Llewelyn, who was also a pioneer of photography. Although much of his exotic planting has gone, the structure of his landscaping remains, as do the ruins of his pioneering orchideous house in the walled garden.

Lever Park, Rivington England, Chorley.
Gifted to the people of Bolton by Lord Leverhulme, Lever Park has been a country park since 1904. The park, which covers about 160 hectares, includes terraced gardens with walks, water features, a Japanese garden with pool, a scale model of Liverpool Castle, and an ornate pigeon tower with a sewing room on the top floor. Much of this is in the process of restoration.

Taitlands England, Settle.
Taitlands is situated just to the south of Stainforth on the Settle Road. It is a single phase building where the house and gardens were planned as an integral whole and not much altered over the last 150 years. A combination of an integrated design with a high level of preservation gives the site its significance. Features include a walled kitchen garden, carriage drive, specimen trees, sundial and coach house. The house was a youth hostel until 2007, but its current use is unknown.

Invereil House Scotland, Dirleton.
Invereil House is a baronial-style house with grounds laid out at the end of the 19th century in the eastern end of Linkhouse Wood. By the early-1990s it had been subdivided, with four owners.

Port Sunlight England, Merseyside.
The site at Port Sunlight comprises three landscaped areas within a garden village laid out in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, to house workers in the soap factory inaugurated in 1888. There is the Dell created in a former tidal channel, and two formal intersecting areas known as The Causeway and The Diamond. All these public open spaces are surrounded by housing with open-plan gardens.

Ynysangharad War Memorial Park Wales, Pontypridd.
Ynysangharad Park is a well-preserved public park of 1923-5, featuring a range of sports facilities. There are also ornamental features, including a bandstand and sunken rockwork garden. The park contains some good mature trees, and retains its traditional flowerbeds.

Stanley Park, Blackpool England, Lancashire.
Stanley Park was opened on the 2nd October 1926, and occupies a total of 104 hectares, including an 18-hole golf course. Features include an Italian garden, a rose garden, a sensory garden, a woodland walk, and a variety of water features. There is a lake terrace and promenade, and a clock tower.

Parcevall Hall England, Skipton.
Parceval Hall has a designed garden associated with a greatly extended farm-house. The site has medieval origins, and was extended in the 17th century with some 20th-century alterations. The gardens are largely of early-20th-century design, which include a formal terrace garden, woodland garden and rock garden.

Hatfield Forest England, Bishop's Stortford.
Hatfield Forest is a rare example of a surviving medieval Royal hunting Forest, characterized by coppices, woodland pasture and rides. In addition to the natural features, the central area contains landscape features mostly dating from the 18th century: an artificial lake, exotic, non-native specimen trees such as planes, yews, horse chestnuts and cedars of Lebanon, and a Shell House or Grotto on the lakeside. Capability Brown was responsible for a slightly later modification to the lake.

Rivington Gardens England, Chorley.
The gardens occupy 18 hectares, and feature terraces and a pool. There are Japanese and Italian-style gardens, a pigeon tower with a sewing room, once used by Lady Leverhulme, on the top floor. There are currently proposals for the restoration of the gardens.

Hallingbury Park England, Bishops Stortford.
Hallingbury Park now comprises mainly large fields used for agricultural purposes, a lake and some wooded areas.
In addition, there are residential buildings around the site of the former residence, Hallingbury Place, park lodges and access roads.

Featured People

Walter Nicol was born in Niddry, not far from Edinburgh. He was the son of a gardener but as a young boy stubbornly refused to follow his father’s profession, preferring an apprenticeship to a shoemaker.

It was during the time that his father, John Nicol, had management of the gardens of the Raith Estate, near Kirkcaldy, however, that Walter experienced a dramatic change of heart. Despite blindness in his right eye caused by a childhood affliction, Walter became a proficient land surveyor and draughtsman.

His first position as a gardener, in 1787, took him to Raynham Hall, the Norfolk home of the Marquess of Townshend. Two years later, he returned to Scotland to take charge of the gardens of Wemyss Castle, Fife, recently re-designed by his father, where he remained until 1797.

Walter made significant additions to his father's layout and drew up lavish designs for heated walls to enable the forcing of tree-fruit, his avowed aim being 'to provide stone fruit for almost every month of the year'. He also designed pineapple pits and mushroom houses. Nicol's friend and editor, Edward Sang, wrote later: 'No spot in the kingdom could exhibit a nicer display of horticultural skill'.

The decision for Nicol and his family to suddenly to leave Wemyss may have been due to the rising costs of the hothouse furnaces, which used 100 tons of coal per annum.

The Scotch Forcing and Kitchen Gardener, was published in 1797 and remained in print for the next 20 years. Nicol took to advertising within his own publications and came to regard The Practical Planter of 1799 as the work which brought him most favourably to the notice of a wide audience, particularly in Scotland.

His primary skills lay in the design and maintenance of hothouses, the maintenance of kitchen and flower gardens, as well as the profitable rejeuvenation of forestry plantations.

In 1800 Nicol began the improvement of the parkland surrounding the splendid mansion at Duncrub near Crieff, Perthshire for Lord Rollo. He undertook much of his work in that county and later worked at Invermay in 1802, Ochtertyre in 1805 and at Gartmore. In 1806 he travelled to Dalhousie Castle in Mid-Lothian where he redesigned the walled gardens and laid out the principal driveway to the north.

Nicol was of the opinion that several different kinds of soil could be necessary in the same garden, often removing thousands of cubic yards of gravel or clay and replacing the original substrate with more fertile soils to achieve a base for horticultural perfection. His methods have been emulated by landscape gardeners ever since.

Through the continuing success of his endeavours and the popularity of his reference works, Nicol was invited to become a founder member of the Caledonian Horticultural Society in 1809, appointed joint-secretary and nominated for the judging committee.

As with so many of his generation, Nicol was possessed of worthy ambitions and rigour of mind that over-exerted his constitution. Seemingly in his prime and having overcome a debilitating rheumatic fever just a few years previously, Nicol undertook the writing of The Planter's Kalendar and agreed to write a treatise on gardens and orchards for the Board of Agriculture. Intending to complete these objectives with his customary thoroughness, Nicol resolved upon an extended tour of the principal estates in England.

On 1 January 1811, upon his return to Scotland, he caught a severe chill, which duly developed into an oedema. He died on 5 March 1811, just short of his 42nd birthday. Fifteen years after his death he was described by J.C.Loudon as 'a Scotch horticultural architect and author of merit'. Patrick Neill, joint-secretary of The Caledonian Horticultural Society with Nicol, wrote of him in 1843 that he was, 'A most distinguished horticulturalist of his day, and eminent in his profession as a landscape gardener'.

Thomas Rivers, the third of that name, was born in Sawbridgeworth in 1797. He consolidated the reputation of the nursery that his grandfather founded. His major interest was the breeding and introduction of new varieties of fruit.

He was responsible for more than 75 different varieties including peach, nectarine, plum, cherry, apple, apricot and pears. Charles Darwin corresponded with him and sought his advice on a regular basis.

Rivers published The Orchard House or the Cultivation of Fruit Trees in Pots under Glass in 1851.

Ken Worpole is a freelance writer on architecture, landscape and public policy. He has written a number of books on landscape, architecture and urban social policy.

Worpole was a founding associate of Demos. He served on the UK Government's Urban Green Spaces Task Force, and is an adviser to CABE and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

He was recently appointed Professor at the Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University. His most recent books include 350 Miles: An Essex Journey with photographer Jason Orton, and Last Landscapes: the architecture of the cemetery in the West.

Robert Smythson, architect and mason, was 79 at the time of his death. However, there is no evidence that indicates the exact date or year of his birth.

There is evidence to suggest, however, that Smythson was working at Longleat House, Wiltshire, England by 1568 where he was employed as master mason by Sir John Thynne. Within 10 years Smythson is known to have been working on alterations at Wardour Castle, Wiltshire for the Arundell family. The castle later became a picturesque feature within the 18th-century landscape developed by a later generation of the family.

It has been suggested that Robert Smythson's connection with Wardour provided him with his commission at Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire. There he was Surveyor of the Works between 1530 and 1588. Other notable works or commissions in England included Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire (1590-1); Burton Agnes, Yorkshire (1601-10); and Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, all of which reveal Smythson's firm understanding of classical architecture.

His son, Sir John Smythson also worked at Wollaton, in the service of the Cavendish rather than the Willoughby family. Robert died at Wollaton on 15 October 1614.

Zachariah Charles Pearson was twice Mayor of Hull. During this time he bought land off Beverley Road, and donated 27 acres of this to the people of Hull as a public park, which bears his name. Unsuccessful business ventures during the American Civil War led to his bankruptcy.

Thomas Knowlton was born in Kent, England and was well known in his lifetime as a botanist and gardener with a special interest in nature, wildflowers and hothouse exotics. He was in charge of the botanic garden of the physician James Sherand at Eltham, Kent and in 1726 he moved to Londesborough, East Yorkshire, England to work for the 3rd Earl of Burlington. It seems that Knowlton spent the rest of his working life as head gardener at Londesborough.

Knowlton was greatly interested in the latest information about the natural world, both native and foreign. He travelled to Guernsey, Holland and London, England and shared his botanical and gardening knowledge with other plant collectors. While he was in charge at Londesborough he also acted as an advisor at other local English estates, such as Everingham, Burton Constable and Birdsall, located in East and North Yorkshire. His additional earnings enabled him to invest in property, literary collections and botanical purchases.

Knowlton's expertise in exotics also enabled him to gain prominence within the landowning elite. Indeed, he was responsible for building the hothouses at Londesborough (1729) and Burton Constable (1758).

Knowlton died aged 90, in 1781 and was buried in the churchyard at Londesborough.

The Honourable Charles Hamilton was the owner and designer of Painshill in Surrey, England.

He was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1704, the youngest son of James, 6th Earl of Abercorn. Educated in England Hamilton attended Westminster School, where he became friends with Henry Hoare (later the owner of Stourhead). He went on to Christchurch College, Oxford graduating in 1723.

Hamilton made two extended Grand Tours of Europe between 1725 and 1732. He spent much time in Italy, where he amassed a considerable collection of antiquities and paintings, and studied landscape painting.

In 1727 he became the member for Strabane in the Irish Parliament, a position he held for 33 years. In 1738, he was made a Clerk of the Household to Frederick, Prince of Wales. Under the Prince's patronage, from 1741 to 1746, he was member for Truro in the English Parliament.

Between 1736 and 1737 Hamilton purchased some 300 acres of land near Cobham in Surrey to form the estate of Painshill. Between 1738 and 1744 he laid out much of the ornamental landscape, including the lake, planting many new tree species, particularly those from North America.

From 1746, after he had fallen out of favour with the Prince of Wales, Hamilton began to devote more time to perfecting his creation, adding many of the follies at Painshill between 1758 and 1762. He also laid out the gardens of Holland House in Kensington, London, England for his friend Henry Fox in the late 1740s.

Money was always an issue for Hamilton, who had no independent income. In 1743 he became Reciever General of His Majesty's Revenues in Minorca, for which he received £1,200 a year. The loss of this post between 1757 and 1763 due to military action, caused him significant financial hardship. From 1758 to 1765 he was deputy to the Paymaster General, which allowed him to continue work at Painshill.

In March 1766, Hamilton mortgaged his estate for £6,000 to his friend, the banker Henry Hoare. Attempts to resolve his financial difficulties failed, and in 1771 Hamilton was forced to put Painshill up for sale.

Hamilton's first wife had died young, leaving two daughters, Jane and Sarah. Hamilton was married again in 1764 to Agnes Cockburn of Ayr, Scotland. She too died at the age of 39, in 1772.

In 1773 Painshill was sold and Hamilton settled in The Royal Crescent, Bath, England. The following year he married Frances Calvert. Over the next few years, he worked on the gardens at Bowood in Wiltshire, England for his friend, Lord Shelburne. He died on 18 September 1786.

Charles McIntosh was born at Abercairney in Perthshire where his father, John, was head gardener. Charles duly succeeded him, before moving to undertake similar responsibilities at the greatly more extensive grounds of Taymouth Castle, where he continued to develop his knowledge of forestry, orchard, kitchen-garden and hothouse management.

By 1825 he had taken charge of the grounds at Stratton Park, Hampshire, home of the banker Sir Thomas Baring. Whilst there, he contributed to the first issue of Loudon's Gardener's Magazine, redesigned the gardens at Pengethley in Herefordshire, laid out and planted the newly created pleasure gardens and conservatory attached to the Colisseum in The Regent's Park, and compiled and had published his first major work of two volumes: The Practical Gardener and Modern Horticulturalist.

McIntosh's energy and intelligence brought him to the attention of Prince Leopold (subsequently the first king of the Belgians) and for 10 years he made great improvements to the grounds adjacent to the royal residence at Claremont House in Surrey. Leopold took McIntosh to Belgium where he remodelled the gardens at Laeken.

In 1838 McIntosh returned to Scotland to undertake his greatest role, that of head gardener to the immensely wealthy Duke of Buccleuch, whose palace gardens at Dalkeith McIntosh updated and modernised to great effect - not least the vast range of productive hothouses that were amongst the most extensive in the UK. It was here that he wrote his major work, The Book of the Garden (also in two volumes), which remained in print long after his death.

Upon his retirement in 1858 McIntosh continued landscaping and improving the villa residences, parks and gardens of the gentry and nobility in Scotland and England. He was an active corresponding member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and also those of The Caledonian and Massachusetts.

Charles McIntosh never set out to emulate such figures as Lancelot Brown or Humphry Repton, but remained at the cutting edge of contemporary horticultural techniques about which he wrote extensively; perhaps his greatest area of expertise being that of hot-house design and heating.

He was known to Queen Victoria and could count among his friends John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843), Professor John Lindley (1799-1865) and Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865). Like Paxton, McIntosh gained the trust and confidence of those whom he served and throughout his life contributed greatly to the scientific and practical advancement of his profession.

He died at his residence in Murrayfield near Edinburgh in January 1864. McIntosh also received a fulsome obituary in The Gardener's Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette of 16 January 1864, in which he was referred to as a 'Veteran in the ranks of horticulturalists...who had occupied a prominent position in the horticultural world'.

Published Works:

Charles McIntosh The New and Improved Practical Gardener and Modern Horticulturalist (1828-29, 2 vols) London

Thomas Johnes was a leading exponent of the Picturesque, an aesthete, book collector and agricultural improver. He created the mansion and landscape at Hafod in the bleak mining landscape of his family lands.

Thomas Knight, one of Britain’s most influential botanists, was born at Wormesley Grange in Herefordshire. He was the son of a parson and the younger brother of Richard Payne Knight, the classical scholar, whose main thrust of work related to theories of the Picturesque. Thomas, who was largely self-taught, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford.

Knight's enduring interest in animal and plant life led him to create a walled garden and modest range of hothouses at his farm at Elton Hall in 1786, where he concentrated on plant growing and livestock breeding. He may well have remained thus but for two significant events.

The first was that Sir Joseph Banks of the London Horticultural Society (later the Royal Horticultural Society) noted the intelligence of Knight’s written work and encouraged his experiments with plant physiology and breeding. In April 1795, Knight read his paper to the Society entitled, 'The grafting of Fruit Trees'. He was aware that many of Britain’s older fruit varieties were in decline, notably apples and pears, as well as cherries, plums and nectarines. Furthermore, he had observed that disease could be passed on by grafting and that poor or irregular cropping of older varieties were affecting trade volumes during a period of particular difficulty - namely, Britain’s lengthening war with France. He regularly corresponded with Banks and published his Treatise on the Culture of the Apple and Pear in 1797.

The second event was that in 1809, Thomas Knight came into possession of the considerable estate of Downton Castle from his brother. With the benefit of his pioneering skills in plant breeding and 10,000 acres of land at his disposal, Knight continued to develop disease-resistant cultivars of tree fruits in their many thousands. His work also raised stocks of potatoes, peas and cabbages to new standards of excellence. He is perhaps best remembered for the Downton Strawberry, or 'Knight's Seedling'.

Knight's published and practical work encouraged landowners, commercial nurserymen and gentlemen gardeners to adopt his findings and to plant new, vigorous varieties with great success. No less a scholarly work, but with exquisite illustrations was Knight's second volume, Pomona Herefordensis, published in 1809. Two years later he was rewarded with the office of President of the London Horticultural Society, a position to which he was re-elected annually until his death.

Thomas Knight was arguably the most innovative botanist of his era. Although his theory of 'degeneration' of fruit has since been disproved by modern methods, his observations of phototropism (the tendency of a plant to turn towards a source of light) and the cambium (the cellular plant tissue responsible for the increase in girth of stems and roots), and his studies on the ascent and descent of sap, have long been accepted facts of plant physiology.

He was held in high regard by contemporary practitioners and writers, notably Charles McIntosh, who wrote in 1826 that 'To the exertions of Knight...we are indebted, for many of our best fruits, and not only the improvements of our native sorts, but also for the introduction of several foreign kinds'.

Professor John Lindley, delivering his introductory lecture to the University of London on 30 April 1824 was yet more fulsome in his praise for Knight: 'Nine-tenths of the most important discoveries that have been made in modern Horticulture, especially the art of regulating and adapting artificial climate to vegetation, are due to the botanical knowledge of the most distinguished vegetable physiologist of this kingdom; whose successful attempts at applying science to practice have recently been crowned, if I may so express myself, by the complete subjugation of the unmanageable constitution of the Pine-apple'.

In 1991, a little over 150 years after Knight's death in 1838, Tim Smit and John Nelson patiently restored the ‘lost’ gardens of Heligan, Cornwall. In rebuilding the pineapple pits to a productive standard, they chose to work to the designs that had been drawn up by Knight in 1822, which had so impressed Lindley and others in their day. The first ripe specimens from Heligan were cut just five years later.

Published Works

Knight, T, A (1797) Treatise on the Culture of the Apple and Pear, London

Jane Wells Loudon (née Webb) was an author, a prolific writer on botanical, horticultural and natural science subjects and a magazine editor active in the 19th century. She was born near Birmingham, England on 19 August 1807, the daughter of a businessman, Thomas Webb.

Jane's mother died when she was 12 years old. Her father died around five years later. As a result of the financial constraints she faced, Jane started writing to earn a living.

Jane's first work was Prose and Verse (1824) and her second was a science fiction novel, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. The latter was published anonymously in 1827.

When author and landscape designer John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) read and reviewed The Mummy! the following year, he was intrigued by it, particularly its mention of the use of steam ploughs, and wanted to meet its anonymous author. He was rather surprised to discover that the author was a woman, rather than the man he had expected, when he finally met Jane in 1830. By this stage Jane had also written Stories of a Bride (1829) and soon would write Conversations on Chronology (1830).

The pair were married seven months after their first meeting, and Jane worked closely with her husband for the rest of his life. They lived at 3 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, London where they cultivated a small garden, designed by Mr. Loudon, and had an impressive collection of plants.

Jane studied botany after her marriage. She attended lectures by the renowned botanist John Lindley (1799-1865), after whom the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library is named, and often wrote up her notes as articles. She travelled widely with her husband, acting as secretary to him on trips throughout the British Isles, helping him to compile, record and edit his books and periodicals, working as his literary assistant,into the early hours of the morning.

Increased debt incurred during her marriage caused Jane to turn to writing again herself. In 1838 she penned the Young Lady's Book of Botany (1838) and in 1839 Agnes, or the Little Girl who Kept a Promise (1839). In 1840 she wrote the very successful Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, as well as the Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (four volumes 1840-1848) and The Young Naturalist's Journey: or the Travels of Agnes Merton and Her Mama(1840).

These latter works were highly accessible, practical books and, as a result, were extremely popular with readers, in particular with female amateur gardeners. They went through several editions and were quickly followed by many other works including The Ladies'Flower-Garden of Ornamental Bulbous Plants (1841), The First Book of Botany … for Schools and Young Persons (1841), Lady's Companion to the Flower Garden. Being an Alphabetical Arrangement of all the Ornamental Plants Usually Grown in Gardens and Shrubberies (1841) and Botany for Ladies, or, a Popular Introduction to the Natural System of Plants (1842).

In 1842 Jane founded and edited the Lady's Magazine of Gardening. In December 1843, John Claudius Loudon died. With his death, Jane faced even greater financial hardship. She continued to write gardening books, often with the help of her daughter, Agnes (born 1832), and to edit and publish earlier editions of both her and her husband's works.

In 1844 Jane received an award from the Royal Literary Fund. She received a civil-list pension of £100 in 1846.Chief among her publications at this stage were her British Wild Flowers (1845), Amateur Gardener's Calender (1847), the Lady's Country Companion at Home and Abroad (which she edited between 1849 and 1851), The Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Greenhouse Plants (1848), Tales About Plants (1853) and My Own Garden, Or, The Young Gardener's Year Book (1855).

Jane died at her London home on 15 July 1858, aged 50. She was survived by her daughter, Agnes and is buried at Kensal Green cemetery.

Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, was an architect and garden designer, a major landowner in Ireland and in England, and a great patron of the arts, active in the 18th century.

In England he had houses at Londesborough, in London's Piccadilly and at Chiswick. Boyle was born at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, England on 25 April 1694. He died on 3 December 1753 at Chiswick and was buried in the family vault at Londesborough on 15 December 1753. Boyle is particularly noted for his patronage of William Kent and for his promotion of the revival of the Palladian style.

Further Reading:

John Parkinson, born in 1566 or 1567 (probably in England), wrote the first substantial book on English gardening, and was one of the first British botanists.

He started his working life in medicine, beginning his apprenticeship to a London apothecary, Francis Slater, at Christmas 1585 and completed serving it in 1593. He went on to become one of the most respected apothecaries in Britain. When the Society of Apothecaries was established in December 1617, John Parkinson was one of the founding members, and served on its governing body, the Court of Assistants. He contributed to the first Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, produced by the College of Physicians. He was elected junior warden of the Society of Apothecaries in August 1620 but at the beginning of 1622, he asked for, and was granted, permission to give up his duties in the Society.

Parkinson then concentrated on his garden in London's Long Acre and started researching and writing his first book:Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris. or A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed vp; with a kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, & fruites, for meate or sause vsed with vs, and an orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing trees and shrubbes fit for our land together with the right orderinge planting & preseruing of them and their vses & vertues collected by Iohn Parkinson apothecary of London 1629.

The book included descriptions of around 1,000 plants, giving information about their origins, alternative names and medicinal properties. Almost 800 of the plants were illustrated. Parkinson dedicated the book to Queen Henrietta Maria and, in return, was given the title Botanicus Regius Primarius (First Botanist to the King) by King Charles I.

He worked for years on his second book, Theatrum Botanicum (short title), which was published in 1640. In it, he described approximately 3,800 plants and their medicinal properties, and referenced many other authors of herbals and botanical books.

John Parkinson was a close friend of John Tradescant the Elder. He had close ties with many other leading plantsmen, herbalists, gardeners and botanists of his time, such as William Coys, John Gerard, Vespasian Robin, and Maathias L'Obel (also known as Lobelius). He collected new varieties of plants through people that he knew abroad and, as early as 1607 had funded William Boel's plant-collecting expedition to Iberia and Africa. Parkinson was the first person in Britain to grow the Spanish double-flowered daffodil.

He died in the summer of 1650 and was buried at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields in London on 6 August 1650. He continued to be celebrated in the 19th century. One of the statues in the Palm House, Sefton Park, Liverpool, commemorates John Parkinson.

Further reading:

William Andrews Nesfield, watercolour painter and landscape gardener, was born in Chester-le-Street, Co. Durham, England and was baptised there on 16 June 1794.

He was educated in England at a preparatory school in Winchester, which was followed by an unhappy year at Winchester College. He spent two terms at Trinity College, Cambridge, before becoming a cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1809. He was taught there by Thomas Paul Sandby, the son of the watercolourist Paul Sandby.

In the autumn of 1813 Nesfield left for the Peninsula War, where he was at Jean de Luz and the attack on Bayonne. He resigned in 1818 to become a watercolourist.

Nesfield was famous for his cascades and looked for subjects in Piedmont and the Swiss Alps, but his landscapes were more often found closer to home in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

He settled in 1820 in London, England had a period in other cities in southern England, before moving into his long-term house at 3 York Terrace, Regent's Park.

From about the time of his marriage to Emma Mills (died 1874) on 13 July 1833, he began a new career as a landscape gardener, often in collaboration with Anthony Salvin (1779-1881). Cascades played their part in his work, although he is best known for his parterres. For two decades he was a sought-after landscape designer, working at various houses in England including Arundel Castle, Sussex; Castle Howard, Yorkshire; Crewe Hall, Cheshire.

He died at his home in York Terrace on 2 March 1881, leaving less than £5,000.

John Vanbrugh was born in 1664 in London, the son of a cloth merchant of Dutch descent called Giles Vanbrook. He grew up in the Roman town of Chester and initially followed in his father's footsteps as a merchant, becoming a factor for the East India Company in Surat, India in 1683. The job was clearly not to his taste for he had returned home to take a commission as an ensign in Lord Huntingdon's regiment at Hounslow by 1686, before resigning eight months later to accompany distant relations Robert and Peregrine Bertie, travelling on the Continent. The three men were in France at the outbreak of the war with the United Provinces in 1688, when Vanbrugh was arrested and accused of having spoken in support of William of Orange. In conjunction with the Dutch derivation of his name this was enough for him to be detained, although the real reason for his imprisonment appears to have been the desire to hold him hostage to assure the safety of a French spy who was in London. Vanbrugh remained immured for four years, being transferred in 1691 to the Chateau de Vincennes and then to the Bastille in Paris. He was finally released and allowed to sail back to England in 1693 where, with encouragement from his friend William Congreve, he became a playwright, staging The Relapse to public approbation at Drury Lane in 1696. This brought him to the attention of the Whig Kit Cat Club and member Charles Montagu, who commissioned his second play, The Provok'd Wife (1697). Several members of the Kit Cat were distant relations of Vanbrugh's and his aristocratic connections meant that he was accepted into the club in the late 1690s as an equal; the Kit Cat was to be the source of much of his income over the following decades.

Vanbrugh had returned to a world where financial and political revolutions were transforming English society; it was a place of opportunity. The new science was generating an atmosphere of enquiry and a desire to further the knowledge of the Ancients, and it resulted in an invigorated demand for classical texts of all kinds. Impoverished authors found employment in translating the classics into English financed by the patronage of the rich, whilst an emerging merchant and professional class and a burgeoning publishing industry furthered the demand for their work, and made it more easily accessible. Clubs and coffee houses fostered discussion of science and the arts and brought men together that had previously been separate; there were new chances to make money from trade and in a nascent finance industry. The advent of a standing army meant that individuals no longer needed to bear arms, the protection of liberty became a commercial transaction and men had free time to consider matters of taste and politeness. Finally, the Enlightenment humanists questioned the role of the Church, reassessing man's place in the world and his relationship with Nature. It was against this backdrop that Vanbrugh decided to reinvent himself as an architect of buildings and of landscapes.

Vanbrugh was undoubtedly an intelligent man with wide-ranging artistic talents and an enquiring mind; his character suggests that it would have taken little thought before he proposed himself as an architect, and as a rival to William Talman who was Comptroller of the Kings Works. The 1690s saw a burgeoning appetite for building country houses and Talman had submitted proposals to another member of the Kit Cat Club, the 3rd Earl of Carlisle, for his new project at Henderskelfe in Yorkshire in 1699. But Carlisle was not happy with Talman's designs and soon afterwards he took the extraordinary decision to replace him with Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh created, with the help of Nicholas Hawksmoor, what has been described as a Baroque masterpiece at Castle Howard, and indeed much of his later building has been widely associated with the English Baroque. However, recent scholarship has highlighted the Palladian elements of Vanbrugh's architecture, most notably the use of symmetry and proportion in his buildings and in the rooms, and the embedding of the house in the landscape - a defining feature of Andrea Palladio's work in the Veneto in sixteenth-century Italy. Vanbrugh was to take Palladio's book Il Quattro Libri, and use it to design both houses and grounds that were founded originally on the work of the ancient Roman writer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (known as Vitruvius).

In 1721 Vanbrugh claimed the landscaping at Castle Howard to be his own, writing to the Duke of Newcastle that he had created the gardens out of ‘bushes boggs and bryars'. In fact the grounds were a combination of his and Carlisle's ideas. The replacement in Ray Wood of George London's star design with an informal meandering of paths amongst the ancient trees, with a scattering of classical statues, cascades and fountains was most likely influenced by Carlisle's tour of Italy, but the inventive wall surrounding the garden was Vanbrugh's. He was the first to use the ha-ha to encircle a garden; it consisted of a high wall sunk into a ditch so that it appeared much lower on the garden side (see diagram in the ‘images' section). This ha-ha was an effective barrier against animals, whilst the low wall on the garden side permitted views of the surrounding country; military style bastions were built at strategic viewing points (the only extant Vanbrugh bastions are at Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland). Although Vanbrugh never went to Italy, he did see the Maréchal de Vauban's military fortifications in France which had a similar form; we can also find examples of this type of barrier in Palladio's work. The structure of the Vanbrugh ha-ha had its roots in the writing of Vitruvius, whilst its use and meaning in the garden came from Pliny The Younger (first century AD) mediated by the Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century; it was indicative of the new understanding of Nature that was associated with the Enlightenment.

At the end of the seventeenth century polite society became immersed in all things classical; from literature and art to philosophy and science. The writing of Pliny, Vitruvius, Alberti and Palladio was recovered in Latin, translated into French and later into English. Men had busts of themselves sculpted wearing Roman togas; they wanted to be depicted as members of the new Roman Republic that was early eighteenth-century England. They built ‘villas' along the Thames on the outskirts of London and retired to the country to manage their farms and write, in emulation of Pliny the Younger. Neo-classicism pervaded all aspects of society and in gardens there was a change of understanding of the words Nature and natural; Nature was seen to embody both the order and symmetry imparted by a designer, as well as the wildness of a country untouched by Art (in other words untouched by man). The appreciation of wild Nature and its association with the stimulation of the imagination (from the philosophy of empiricism) led to the opening of gardens to the surrounding countryside, the preservation of pre-existing woodlands and the building of lakes (all of which were features of Vanbrugh's work). Instead of being a symbol of man's control over Nature, as it had been in the formal garden of the seventeenth century, geometry in the garden became a reference to the innate order of Nature (as seen by Vitruvius in the perfect proportions of man) and thus took on a covert form - it literally went underground. Whilst some geometry could still be seen in sections of the garden, rectangular garden rooms clustered close to the house and bold radiating avenues gave way to an underlying framework that tied a landscape scheme together. This change was first demonstrated at Castle Howard. Vanbrugh's innovative use of the natural topography to hide and reveal gateways and obelisks along the approach roads to the house, together with his apparent scattering of romantic temples, have obscured the geometric skeleton that ties the elements of the Castle Howard landscape together; as a result, the grounds at Castle Howard have been interpreted as ‘transitional', as a move towards the landscape garden associated with Lancelot Brown. However it is important to view early eighteenth-century gardens as unique, not as a step towards a future form that could never have been envisaged by the men making them; the Enlightenment garden was the distinctive product of the culture, the politics and the people of the time.

Vanbrugh used both overt and hidden geometry in his schemes; his striking Obelisk Parterre on the south front of Castle Howard was not universally admired, but his use of classical symbolism in the form of pyramids, obelisks and Vitruvian temples was to be copied in many gardens over the coming decades. The ha-ha would be used to advantage in the bastion garden at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire known as the Woodwork (from 1705); it then appeared in Vanbrugh's own garden at Chargate in Surrey (from 1709) and at Stowe in Buckinghamshire (from 1716). By the 1720s Vanbrugh's ha-ha was a commonplace; the low wall on the garden side would eventually disappear creating the illusion that there was no barrier at all (see the excellent example at Houghton in Norfolk). His use of underlying geometrical frameworks was to be taken up by Charles Bridgeman and was evident in Bridgeman's designs at Hackwood in Hampshire (1720s) and Gobions in Hertfordshire (1730s); such hidden frames persisted in designed landscapes into the late eighteenth century.

Vanbrugh should be credited with the following innovations in garden design:

• The first use of the bastioned ha-ha to surround a garden, the proliferation of the military garden style and the inclusion of fields and forests as a part of a landscape scheme (Castle Howard 1705, Blenheim Palace 1705, Stowe from 1716)

• The promotion of architectural features formed out of living plants in gardens, known as ‘architecture in green' (parterre at Stowe, from 1716)

• The idea of flooding a river valley to form a natural lake (Welbeck Abbey, 1703, Blenheim 1707; neither executed)

• The use of natural topography to create a dramatic effect (Castle Howard approach roads from 1699)

• The inclusion of large bodies of water outside the garden as a part of the overall scheme for a landscape (Kings Weston from 1710 Severn Estuary, Seaton Delaval from 1719 North Sea)

• Embedding houses in the countryside, in direct opposition to the seventeenth-century style of placing a disconnected building on the landscape (all of his projects)

• Pushing geometry underground and using the natural landscape as a background to his buildings (all of his projects)

All of these innovations mark Vanbrugh as a neo-classicist, a man of the British Enlightenment. It is important therefore that we do not categorize his landscape designs by considering only the Baroque decoration of his buildings.

Humphry Repton, landscape designer, was born on 21 April 1752 at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England. He is regarded as the last great landscape designer of the 18th century and was determined to succeed 'Capability' Brown.

Despite early business failures in the textile industry Repton was able to call upon his social contacts to become patrons for his first landscape commissions. His first was at Catton, Norfolk, England for the mayor and textile merchant, Jeremiah Ives, and his second was at Holkham, England (1788) for Thomas Coke.

Repton viewed landscaping as an art form and this can be found when studying his renowned 'Red Books' or folios, which he used to present his plans, drawings, maps and passages of writing. Not all of his commissions were associated with a Red Book, but they were nonetheless, an important element of his landscape repetoire.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Repton was embroiled in a dispute with Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price regarding the development of the Picturesque. The dispute centred on the relationship between landscape gardening and landscape painting. Knight and Price were experts on the master painters and as such believed that the improvement of landscapes should be based on the rules of landscape art; Repton vehemently disagreed.

Despite these disputes Repton maintained his reputation and was employed at a large number of estates, particularly in England, including Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire; Woburn Abbey, Bedforshire; Tatton Park, Cheshire; Longleet, Wiltshire; Harewood House, West Yorkshire; and Cobham Hall, Kent.

Repton died on 24 March 1818 at Hare Street in Essex, where he had spent the last four years corresponding with his friends and family as well as writing his memoirs.

Ralph Hancock was born Clarence Henry Ralph Hancock in Cardiff on 2 July 1893.

He served in World War I, being promoted from Private to 2nd Lieutenant, but was wounded and invalided out. He married in 1917, and his son, Bramley Hancock, who later joined him in his business, was born the following year.

He designed a number of important gardens including the "Garden of Nations" and the Promenade on Fifth Avenue at the Rockefeller
Centre, New York in 1935 , the roof garden at Derry and Toms in Kensington, London (now the Kensington Roof Garden) in 1938 and a roof garden at Windsor Castle. He also designed and built a sunken garden at Ferrining in Sussex for Edward Hulton, the newspapaer magnate.

He was a regular Gold Medal winner at Chelsea and exhibitor in the Ideal Home Exhibitions both before and after World War II.

James Backhouse (3) was a nurseryman and alpine specialist active in the 19th century. He was a member of the noted Backhouse family of horticulturalists and naturalists and a member of the Society of Friends.

Backhouse was born in Darlington, England on 8 July 1794, the son of James Backhouse (2) (1757-1804).

In 1815, together with his brother, Thomas Backhouse (1792-1845), James Backhouse established James Backhouse & Son of York (and later of Leeds), a plant nursery first based at Telford Nursery, York, on what was once the old York Friars Gardens owned by the Telford family.

James married Deborah Lowe (1793-1827) of Worcester in November 1822. Deborah had been very ill when she was young, and suffered ill-health after her marriage to James. She died at the age of 34 on 10 December 1827, and was memorialised by her husband in A Memoir of Deborah Backhouse of York, 1828.

In 1831, Backhouse embarked on a combined missionary tour and plant collecting expedition of Australia, Mauritius and southern Africa, leaving his two young children in the care of family. During his decade abroad, he corresponded with his friends and family in England, including his brother Thomas who was managing and developing the nursery in his absence.

In 1851, together with his son, James (4) (1825-1890), he travelled to Norway. The two also toured the Arctic Circle and several parts of Great Britain in search of plants. Backhouse died in 1869.

Sources:

Backhouse, James, A Memoir of Deborah Backhouse of York; Who Died the Tenth of the Twelfth Month, 1827; Aged Thirty-four Years (W. Alexander & Son, York, 1828).

James Pulham was the founder of what became one of the most successful firms of landscape gardeners in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

There were four generations of Pulhams, each called James. James Pulham senior was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk. His date of birth is uncertain, but is likely to have been between 1788 and 1796.

James and his brother Obadiah were apprenticed to John Lockwood, a local builder, where they developed a talent for stone modelling. The Pulham brothers gradually took over the business after 1824 when it moved to London, specialising in the production of artificial stone and ornamentation.

James Pulham died suddenly in 1838 and the business was taken over by his son, James, then aged 18. The firm did not become known as Pulham and Son until 1865, when the third James joined the firm.

He trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and was Deputy Parks Manager and then Parks Manager for Bristol City Council for 21 years, from 1971 to 1992..

Dr. Barber moved into consultancy in 1992, and has lectured widely. He is currently Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.

He was an expert adviser to the Heritage Lottery Fund, helping to set up the first Urban Parks Programme. He has been a commissioner for CABE Space and a member of the Government's Urban Green Spaces Taskforce.

Dr. Barber was a founding member of the Urban Parks Forum, now GreenSpace.

Mavis Batey is a historian of gardens and literature, and the author of many books and articles. She was Honorary Secretary of the Garden History Society from 1971 to 1985, and President from 1985 to 2000.

Mrs. Batey was born Mavis Lever in Norbury, south London. She married Keith Batey in 1942. From 1940 to 1945, Mrs. Batey served as a code-breaker for British Intelligence at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire .

In the 1960s Mrs. Batey was active in the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. From 1970 to 1992, she was a tutor in the history of landscape at the Oxford Department of External Studies.

As Honorary Secretary of the Garden History Society, Mavis Batey played a leading role in the campaign to protect and conserve historic parks and gardens in the 1970s and 1980s.

She helped to gain legal and official recognition for historic gardens, and, working with the Historic Buildings Council, instigated the formal recording of historic gardens which led to the publication of English Heritage's Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England in 1984. She was a member of the English Heritage Historic Parks and Gardens Panel from 1984 to 1994.

Mrs. Batey was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1985, and received the MBE in 1987 for services to the preservation and conservation of historic gardens.

William Goldring was born in May 1854 at West Dean, near Chichester. He ran the herbaceous department at Kew Gardens from 1875-79. After this time, he was assistant editor of The Garden and editor of Woods and Forests between 1879 and 1886.

He set up as a landscape architect in 1887. His first work of significance in this capacity was at Earl's Court, where he created the Exhibition Grounds from the previous area of market gardens. He gained such recognition for this work that he was recommended to undertake the commission for the new Italian Gardens at Makurpuri in Gujurat, India. Other work abroad included a commission at Chateau Laversine, south-west France for Baron Rothschild.

In England, he is associated with work on more than 700 projects. Of particular note is his work at Napsbury, around 1902, a site which remains largely unchanged. This was laid out in an informal style featuring both native and exotic species, and retaining a number of mature trees already on the site.

Goldring's work included private houses, asylums and public parks. He was President of the Kew Guild in 1914 and remained on the committee at Kew until his death in 1919.

Featured Articles

Edward Leeds, plantsman and daffodil hybridist, was born at Buile Hill, Pendleton on 9 September, 1802. He was the eldest of four children born to Thomas and Ann, daughter of Joseph Rigby of Swinton Park, Manchester.

‘Dales Plants and Gardens 1900-1960’ is a volunteer-run oral history project, which began in October 2007 to record people's memories of food plants gathered and grown during the first half of the 20th century in Swaledale, Arkengarthdale and Wensleydale.

Here volunteer Sally Reckert writes about the food grown in private gardens and allotments in the North Yorkshire Dales.

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Ernest Henry ‘Chinese' Wilson was a botanist, explorer, photographer, plant collector and writer active in America, Western China and England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He gained the nickname ‘Chinese' from the many plants in China he discovered and later introduced to the West. Dr Susan Gordon highlights the legacy, life and travels of this Gloucestershire-born adventurer.

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‘Dales Plants and Gardens 1900-1960’ is a volunteer-run oral history project, which began in October 2007. They are recording people's memories of food plants gathered and grown during the first half of the 20th century in Swaledale, Arkengarthdale and Wensleydale.

Volunteer Sally Reckert writes about the methodology that they have developed for the project to research and record the small gardens and allotments.